Triumphs and Tribulations: Completing my Honors Thesis

During my senior year, I received the opportunity to develop an original honors thesis surrounding a topic of my choosing. Since I planned to pursue a graduate degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, I could not wait to get started on this project.

Over the past year, I developed a project focusing on the impact of ignoring an individual’s preference on their levels of collaborative productivity, engagement, and feelings of control. I decided to look deeper into these relationships by seeing how individuals whose task preference was ignored performed within a collaborative task. Dismantling collaboration can lead to detrimental effects on organizations, so understanding more about this relationship could offer helpful advice to managers. 

Once I scoured the literature for information surrounding my interests, I began working on designing my study. The study design process was the most difficult part of this entire project, but also the most interesting. I spent weeks trying to pick out the perfect measures, organize my study in logical manner, and prepare my visuals for IRB approval. Although this was time-consuming, I eventually completed the design and received approval to collect data.

After completing the data collection for this study, I conducted analyses using R Studio, a data analysis platform used often in academia. My analyses yielded many interesting results, which I had the opportunity to discuss at the Honors Program Spring Colloquium in a 12-minute talk. Being able to present my project to my friends, advisors, and professors was an amazing experience. Designing this study developed my skills in literature searches, data analysis (R), academic writing, presenting, and more. This project challenged me to think critically about each step of the research process and what I could do to make my project the best it could possibly be. I am very proud of the final product, and I hope to continue this important work in the future.