Shortly after the conclusion of my Preliminary exams, I started my journey as a Laidlaw Scholar. After much packing and unpacking and moving around, I've finally settled in my summer accommodation, and have had the great opportunity to explore a new area of Oxford.
The highlight of my week has been meeting my group for this project. Each member of the team is extremely caring and hardworking, and I can't wait to spend the next 6 weeks collaborating! Our project is a quantitative analysis of data collected from two pilot studies across a primary school in Oxford, and in Sunderland. These studies aimed to investigate the relationship between implemented extracurricular enrichment and teamwork, adapting, belonging, and school engagement. This project is particularly exciting as I'm considering a future career in educational psychology, so this project will provide valuable insight into how policy impacts everyday life across UK primary education.
An issue we had to navigate was our varying academic backgrounds and experiences. All coming from STEM backgrounds, we've had some experience with data analysis. However, while some of us had experience using Python as a means of data analysis, others had only used R, and our supervisor introduced is to a new data analysis tool – Stata. Many conversations this week centered around how we would approach data analysis to most efficiently conduct this project.
Working on our research proposal has been very rewarding. After a meeting with our supervisor on Thursday, we were able to clarify some key points about the direction of our project, and refine our research proposal to reflect this.
Outside of our Laidlaw duties, we enjoyed exploring some Oxford colleges and getting to know each others background – both personal and academic. I'm looking forward to developing this project further, and strengthening bonds with other Laidlaw Scholars.
Next week, we have the exciting opportunity to visit the primary school in Oxford where the data for our project was collected. I'm looking forward to what insight this can provide to our data analysis.