The first two weeks of my Laidlaw research project have gone by incredibly fast, but I’ve learned a good few things on the fly during this time. Two weeks ago, I didn’t know what it meant to do social science research. So, because I can now answer that question quite confidently, I know that I’ve learned quite a bit. In my group, we are researching what extracurricular interventions exist in Oxford and other places around the world, and how these could be mapped to a longitudinal extracurricular run for local students. To do this, we have started working on a database where we can store information we find online. I’ve worked with databases in a different context before (data science and machine learning) and so it’s quite interesting to see just how hard it is to set up a database. We’ve just gotten started on this front, though, so I expect that the puzzle pieces will fall in place soon.
In parallel with our research, we’ve also been delivering an extracurricular programme for local schools. I was quite worried about working with students in the UK: I’ve done my whole schooling in California and so I had no clue what to expect from British students. I guess it wasn’t nearly as hard as I anticipated it to be. My experiences coaching and teaching students in my hometown ended up mapping quite nicely to working with the students here in Oxford. So, I’m looking forward to the familiarity of the extracurricular, especially as I continue to navigate the new and unfamiliar realm of social sciences research.