June 10, 2022
What I've Learned From Being a McNair Scholar
It is just the start of summer which means the spring semester is finished and my first year of being a McNair scholar is now complete. Although this past year seemed to bypass quickly, I feel as if I have learned so much and gained so many new connections because of my involvement with this program. One of the things I have learned is how to effectively communicate with my peers, faculty, and mentor. Although I wasn't able to attend in-person to the various workshops offered throughout the spring semester, I was still able to participate with others in my cohort. One workshop given was aimed at helping us develop our elevated pitch where I was able to reach out to another member of my cohort and practice with that student applying the same content other students had learned in person. Another workshop was learning how to create a CV in addition to our resumes. I learned this was important in being able to give more detail about the experience, knowledge, and skills you had obtained since the beginning of freshman year. I was able to talk directly with a career service faculty member who was able to polish and add necessary details to showcase everything I have gathered from being an undergraduate student. Through this program, I have also gotten to know the faculty staff in the kinesology department even better as well as my personal mentor. One of the biggest takeaways I have received from my mentor is it's okay to not know everything and seek help elsewhere. I have seen my mentor reach out and ask questions to other faculty members whenever she wasn't sure about something. This helped me realize I can still communicate with my mentor whenever I'm personally feeling unsure about an element of my project without the feeling of being unintelligent.
Finally able to attend in person and see my cohort!
Applying What I Learned
One of the things I learned how to do was fill out the necessary documents for my research project. This included a financial grant from the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects (ORSP) and an application for the International Review Board. These documents were quite overwhelming and confusing especially since I have never done any type of this work. Thankfully, my mentor and fellow classmates in my cohort were able to help along the way! Another thing we learned throughout the year was how to narrow down the top graduate schools we were wanting to apply to our senior year. In the spring semester, we had a guest speaker who was a previous McNair scholar and she advised us to branch out of our comfort zone. This helped me realize I wanted to apply to a few graduate schools in the eastern Wisconsin area instead of just the Minnesota and western region. Throughout the year we had to create a spreadsheet of potential schools which was something I thoroughly enjoyed doing. I would be what people consider "Type-A" so creating this graph was something beneficial to me in organizing the information needed since every school is different. Overall, my first year was filled with a lot of new information and skills I hadn't utilized before but it has gained me more professional skills I will be able to use in my senior year and onto graduate school.
Last meeting of the year!