Hello everyone! 

I can't believe that we are already on Week 6---the program has flown by! The past two weeks have definitely been busy, but I'm excited to share that my project has been going well. The fourth week of my project was mostly characterized by survey recruitment. For my project on health insurance literacy of college students, I developed a 3 part online survey so my biggest challenge for that week was recruiting volunteers to take my survey. My biggest tasks were making and posting promotional flyers and graphics with links/QR codes to the survey and appropriate information, emailing with university faculty, and contacting everyone I knew to take my survey.  This was my first time doing something like this, so I have a newfound respect to everyone who does advertising for a living because this is definitely difficult! The most critical challenge to my survey recruitment was the timeframe. The IRB approval process was pretty lengthy and I knew that I needed to leave myself time at the end of the 6 weeks for data analysis and poster construction, so my survey was only open for just over a week. However, despite the short time period, I was able to get over 200 responses which I was happy with! The generalizability of my data is limited as the sample is relatively small and not a random sample, however in terms of the scale of my project, I'm proud of what I have so far. During week 5, I started working with my data. The survey was conducted on Qualtrics, which is a university sponsored platform that I haven't used in the past, so it took me a little bit to figure out to export my data in the best way. The first thing I did was strip the data of any identifying information. To incentivize participation, there was an optional raffle for an $100 Amazon gift card at the end of my survey. As I was planning on keeping data anonymous, this raffle was entirely optional and respondents therefore had to opt into the raffle by voluntarily providing an email address. So I separated the email addresses from the main data set and stored that confidentially until I conduct the raffle and delete the information. Then I focused on cleaning up the data that I had---removing responses that were not finished or ineligible for analysis (for example, if the respondent was not an undergraduate student at Georgetown). At the end of this process, I had 190 useable responses in an organized Excel spreadsheet. I also began the process of data analyzation by learning about the platform Stata. My faculty mentor recommended this software, but I have never done any data analysis like this before, so I had to start by learning about Stata through videos and online manuals. My tasks for the end of the program are to finish my data analysis and make my research poster. Despite some challenges, my project has been going well and this has been an amazing learning experience. I can't wait to share more details of my results with you all soon! :)