Attending the 2019 SEPA conference in Jacksonville, FL was a wonderful experience. I was fortunate enough to be a part of two research projects, one as a part of the undergraduate CEPO part of the conference. My CEPO project was entitled “The Real Home Field Advantage: Baseball, Circadian Rhythms, and Jet Lag” and was a statistical analysis of the 2018 World Series in relation to athlete performance. I was able to develop this project with the assistance of Dr. Suzanne Woodward who has experience in clinical sleep psychology. She helped me analyze previous research on Jet Lag and travelling athletes and provided me with assistance in creating this project. I am very thankful for her assistance and the expertise she provided me to fully understand and develop my research.

The second project I worked on was entitled “Calm Before the Storm? Hurricane Irma, Anticipatory Coping, and Facebook”. This project explored the ways that Facebook users described the site’s impact on their anxiety levels before Hurricane Irma. I am a research assistant for Dr. Paul Harris on this project and benefitted immensely from his guidance and knowledge during this research project. He taught me about qualitative data analysis which we then applied to our dataset of over 1,400 open ended responses. This hands-on experience enabled me to fully understand and gain confidence in the research process. Overall, both projects that I was fortunate enough to be a part of provided me with extremely valuable experiences and knowledge in conducting research.