Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Broader Impact!

It is crunch time for submitting my revised NSF grant. Yesterday and today, I have been working on my Impact Statement which describes how receiving the NSF grant will enable me to have a broader impact in science and the public interest beyond the actual research objectives of the grant. I have been compiling a list of former students to demonstrate that students working in my lab do go on to be highly successful after graduating from Wofford. I hope you find this data as interesting as I did. 
  1. Over the last 9 years as a faculty member at Wofford, 52 students have conducted research under my mentoring in my lab. That's an average of almost 6 students a year!
  2. Every psychology major is required to conduct a research thesis during their senior year, therefore a majority (but only slight) of student researchers in my lab are seniors (52%) and thus have limited research exposure. However, of my 52 student researchers 10% were freshmen, 15% were sophomores, and 23% were juniors when they started working in the lab. Many of these underclass students continued to work in the lab for multiple semesters.
  3. 68% or 30 of 52 student researchers have gone on to graduate school in fields such as neuroscience PhD (3), medicine (8), health-related professions (6), clinical PhD or counseling (11), and 1 student went to law school and another received her masters in history. Pretty impressive!
Do you want to be the next greatest success story? If so, contact me to learn how you can get invovled in my lab's research!