Entry Two: The Threat of Gaza to Israel

The Threat of Gaza to Israel was the title of one of the break out sessions I was to attend on Monday. It was about the conflict, and realistically how much damage Gaza could do. I had been looking forward to learning about it, however, Monday morning we woke up to the news that Gaza had fired a rocket 20 miles outside of Tel Aviv.

This theoretical discussion had suddenly become very real. Israel is one of the biggest moral conflicts I struggle with. I think about it every day, and I am at a loss of what to do. The Jewish side of me believes that Israel should have a state, that there is a long history of discrimination, and that there is no question on the matter. The human rights activist side of me has some serious issues with the country.

In the break out session, we talked a lot about life in Gaza. The strip is extremely over populated, left without any water, and half of the citizens are under 25. They live in unbearable conditions, and need to be treated better. They are lead by a recognized terrorist organization, and Israel refuses to negotiate with them. Additionally, Hamas believes that Israel does not have the right to exist.

There is no simple fix here, and there is no question as to why the rockets started flying on Monday. This oppression has to stop, but there is not a clear way on how to solve it. These conversations are so important to have, because the hypothetical situation can turn real very quickly.

Entry One: Christianity is Everywhere

When first traveling to Israel, I really did not know what the purpose of a Jewish state was. I am Jewish, I thought it was important, but I didn’t know what it meant.

When I got there, I realized I had lived my entire life accepting that I was different and I would never be given religious equality. I was blissfully unaware of the impact that had on my life. Yes, I realized that the section of Target was smaller for Hanukkah than Christmas, but it was never that big of a deal to me. Once I got to Israel, I was able to experience what it was like to be the religious majority for the first time in my life.

I was exited to go to AIPAC because I imagined that I would have the same feeling. For the most part, I did. I was in a place where almost everyone was Jewish, and understood the importance of Israel as well as recognizing the problems. However, I was still in the US. When walking into the convention center, one of the first things I saw was a giant cross. After spending more time at the conference, speakers and panelists talked about the importance of Israel for Christians, and Mike Pence said a Christian prayer.

This reinforced my ideas of why I believe in Israel, and why it is so important to find a solution. It made me realize that even in a room with 18,000 Jews, Christianity will still reign. Christianity is everywhere.

Learning From Others

When I wasn’t presenting my poster, I attended other poster sessions and panel discussions from other Rollins students and professors. On the same day of my presentation, we had our other students present their posters with the professors they worked with. Kaylee Atwell, a Rollins alum, did a paper presentation with Dr. Andrew Luchner before my poster presentation about her senior research from the previous year.

Jenny Goldsher was a research assistant for both Dr. Woodward and Dr. Harris on two separate research projects; one was about circadian rhythms in baseball players and the other was about people’s coping mechanisms on Facebook before Hurricane Irma. Kaitlin Snyder presented two posters, one of them being an extension of research about personality and compassion. Charlotte Leftwitch, Jessica Gonzalez, Dr. Houston and Dr. Harris had a poster exploring the construct of GRIT. Dr. Dunn presented a poster on her research in conjunction with the business department at Rollins about facial characteristics.

                                                          Jenny and Dr. Woodward at the 8:30-10:50 am poster session.

On Friday, Dr. Dunn, Dr. Luchner, Kaylee, Nicole Dunn (Dr. Dunn’s daughter) and Kaitlin spoke on a panel discussion about the challenges clinician professors face in the classroom settings and how to deal with them. They mostly spoke about the boundaries that they set with students, as students have a tendency to disclose information to them like they are their own personal therapists. This is an important issue, as it breaks ethical guidelines that professors have with their students. They spoke about setting boundaries right away with students and having them have space to talk about some of their issues. If they felt that they were unable to remain objective, they would speak with the student about going to CAPS or other services.

I learned so much about other research areas from my colleagues and I am excited for their future research!

Presentation Day

On 3/21, I presented my Honors in the Major senior thesis at the Southeastern Psychological Association (SEPA) with my professor/mentor, Dr. Rachelle Yankelevitz (Dr. Y). I have been working on every aspect this project since May 2018. There has been countless hours of hard work since starting this and I am so proud that I was able to present this to my peers, professors and other researchers at the conference.

What made this extra special was that my presentation was on World Down syndrome Day. The subject of my research is a 5-year-old from the Hume House with Down syndrome. To show support for the special day, everyone is encouraged to wear “silly socks” and/or wear yellow and blue. Dr. Y and I decided to wear our versions of “silly socks” and put a small sign on the poster about our support for the cause.

  Our “silly socks!”        I wore a pink sock with hearts on it and a Star Wars sock. Dr. Y wore dog socks!

Once we set up the poster, we took our shoes off so everyone passing by could see the socks. It was well received by everyone who stopped by the poster; they would see the sign, look down at our feet and smile or say “good for you.”

  Dr. Y and I in front of my poster.              I got ribbons on my badge that said “First time attendee” and “Poster presenter.”

The session only lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes, which went by fast! I spoke with current UCF psychology students, a researcher who was familiar with video modeling for children with autism, and other Rollins professors who were interested in my project. My main goal was to be able to say what my project was able in the most concise way possible. I reached that goal, as evidenced by the verbal reinforcers of “Very good/that is exactly how to say this” after I spoke with a person. Overall, I had a positive experience presenting my research!

 My poster                      presented at the conference and the sign that referenced our socks.

During the 2019 SEPA conference in Jacksonville, FL I was able to gain valuable knowledge through interacting with other students and professors. Three other students attending the conference had first-hand experience with the graduate school application process. I was able to ask them questions about their experiences, and they provided me with information and suggestions specifically about the interview process.

All of the Rollins psychology professors on the trip were very helpful and excited to discuss both undergraduate research and the graduate school process. From these meaningful conversations, I sparked a few ideas for future research as well as gained a better understanding of the undergraduate research process as a whole. I enjoyed getting to hear about research from all of my professors’ viewpoints. Since the department contains a diversely specialized group of professors (Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Psychology, Social Psychology, Sleep Psychology, I/O Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, ect.), I was able to gain a complete set of information on the research process. I am very appreciative of how genuinely supportive all of the professors on the trip were, not only during our presentations but during our free time as well. It was also interesting to see all of the different research projects that students and faculty were working on. Specifically, I was impressed to see the diversity in research not only within our group but throughout the entire conference. This challenged me to consider new areas of interest and helped me gain knowledge on new topics.

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.

During the conference, especially during my poster session, I had the chance to talk to all kinds of people and learn from them by introducing each other’s research projects. The most exciting part was when I talked to a person working on genes related to cancer. With his profound knowledge on GSTM genes, we had a long discussion on how this unique genotype takes place in certain people’s genomes and how it may influence their ability to resist the development of cancer. Since my study was mostly focused on lipid metabolism, this is something I have never thought about. I also got the chance to talk to a graduate student studying binding partners of myosin 19, because she has found something that is closely related to my thesis project.

Besides talking to scientists, I also visited companies and stores and have gained a lot of gifts. Besides free T-shirts, coloring books, calendars, notebooks, we also got free DNA ladders, DNA polymerase and free antibodies! I also found a software named BioRender, which can be very useful for making figures for presentation and papers. I am sure those things will greatly aid for my thesis project, which is one of the most important tasks I need to accomplish next semester. I greatly appreciate the chance to attend this conference, and wish to have the chance to go there more often in the foreseeable future. Thanks to our lovely college, the SHIP grant, and Dr. Walsh, and everyone who made this possible.

ASCB/EMBO is the first conference I have ever attended in my life. According to Dr. Walsh, ASCB held in San Diego are usually the best ones because of its fine weather and convenient transportation downtown. This is very true. I was very much amazed when I realized that the convention center is less than a mile away from our hotel. With the ubiquitous scooters available for rent on the street, I could easily get to the conference within 2 minutes. This enabled me to maximumly enjoy the conference and could easily get back to the hotel as needed.

Despite the fact that I have inadequate knowledge or expertise on most of the topics covered in this conference, I have learned a lot from the talks I went to and from talking to people from all over the world. The most interesting talk I went to was trying to explain why cytoskeleton structures like microtubules and actins would organize in certain ways to ensure efficient distribution of molecules and organelles. This is when I realized how important it is to using math models sometimes in biology to help solve complicated problems. I have also went to talks about making artificial cells and generating complex organoids using human induced pluripotent stem cells. Those things provide great insights into how cell biology and the whole field of biomedical science would become in the future, and encouraged me to become part of it.

Today, January 4, 2018, is my first day at the Hawaii University Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Conference. I gave my presentation in the first session of the day. In my session there were two other professors from California and Canada presenting. They had extremely interesting research on topics such as trauma and abuse victims and dogs being sources of good therapy and motivation. Giving my presentation was a great new experience, from which I learnt a lot. Before giving my presentation, I had to learn how to reconstruct and shorten my paper so that I could present it within the time, and still make my argument strong and compelling. Practicing how to annunciate and read clearly, were skills that I further refined through preparing for this speech. Today when I gave my speech I learned how to be professional when presenting and putting my nerves aside, as well as answering questions in depth and intellectually. This experience with presenting my own research taught me how to be professional and interact in a professional setting with other professionals. I had the pleasure after giving my presentation to two pprofessors from California, who were impressed by my research and even offered to help me with future endeavors with law school. After my session I had the pleasure of attending another session, in which my professor, Dr. McLaren, was presenting. The session focused on gender issues, and there were presentations on sexual assault in college and the stereotypes of yoga and its effects of women. I was able to learn so much throughout the sessions from many different disciplines. So far this experience has allowed me to grow as an intellectual and professional, which is important since I have graduated college and will be immersing myself in many professional experiences.

The SEPA conference overall was such an enriching experience because it awesome to see and meet so many people passionate about the same subject. Also, it was incredible to see the diversity in the subject of psychology and how people are taking theoretical information and using it to study things from homophobia to using emojis. It definitely inspired me to take political psychology research to a national level and find trends in political behavior and why it happens. Especially in our present political climate being able to understand why people believe what they believe will allow us to possibly become empathetic towards differing opinions. Seeing research not only as a academia requirement but as a necessity to improve society is inspiring and definitely makes me want to research even after my college career. This experience has also shown me that Rollins small liberal arts environment made it a little easier to talk to professors and researchers that came up to me because we practice that skill at Rollins daily. If I went to a large state school I probably would have been more intimidated. Overall, it was a great experience that has got me thinking about furthering my research involvement in the future.