Before beginning the 6 week research period I felt slightly lost without the narrowed research focus I knew I’d need to have. How could I create truly meaningful research on how Trinity engages with socioeconomic class? I spent the weekend prior to my research reading ‘Poor’ by Katriona O’Sullivan, a brilliant memoir full of grit and resilience, highlighting barriers to education and how important access programmes to university are for working-class communities. This gave me even more passion and drive for the project but I still lacked a focus. This was particularly difficult as I wanted to try look at post-primary school data (students aged ~12-18) however finding publicly available data for this was troublesome due to the sensitive nature of the topic, the lack of centrally collected data by the State, and the fact that the data would predominantly concern minors, adding a whole host of ethical concerns. 

After spending almost 2 weeks simply trying to tease out my focus of the project, I decided (with lots of helpful guidance from Trinity staff) to look at progression rates from post-primary schools to higher education which are publicly collected annually by reputable publications in Ireland. My main goal was to see if there were certain schools that aren’t receiving extra State or Higher Education supports that are near schools receiving supports via linkage with Trinity College but that have lower than average rates of progression to higher education to provide possible recommendations for Trinity. The data was incredibly interesting to sift through, and I found myself looking at other dimensions such as if linkage to a certain university or college impacted progression rates, or if being single-sex (all boys or all girls) or a co-educational (mixed) influenced progression either. Throughout the research, when feeling lost or unmotivated, I was reminded of ‘Poor’ and of the work that is still to be done in making education the so-called ‘equaliser’ it's meant to be.