Blog
McNair Conferences
August 9, 2024
A look at the conference opportunities the McNair program has provided me
As a McNair scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, I have had the opportunity to attend professional development conferences across the country.
National McNair Conference: UMD
My very first conference ever was in College Park, Maryland at the 2024 National McNair Scholars Conference. It was an action-packed trip for myself and my UWEC McNair cohort. As a group, we attended a graduate school fair, numerous panels made up of University of Maryland-College Park faculty speaking about higher education and research, and made after-hours trips to Capitol Hill, Monument Square, and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.. Individually, I attended workshops on obtaining external funding for graduate programs and refining my personal statement and had the opportunity to support my fellow McNair scholars from different programs as they presented their summer research projects. The social aspect of this conference was a pleasant surprise: I was able to meet so many new people and learn about their research, even if it didn’t exactly pertain to my own field. I learned so much more about research, like the procedure for working through IRB protections of vulnerable populations from a math education major, qualitative methods and interview transcription from a political science major, and was able to facilitate a connection between one of my classmates and a scholar from California who had overlapping research interests. I arrived in Maryland with the understanding that the conference would be a learning experience, but I never anticipated that I would come back to Wisconsin with so many new personal connections.
McNair Research Summit: UWS
Most recently, I attended the University of Wisconsin-Superior’s 2024 McNair Research Summit. This conference centered around teaching McNair scholars the key to successfully attending a conference, and I found myself surprised at the amount of new information I was presented with even though this was not my first conference. I learned what role conferences play in a professional’s life, how to avoid burning myself out on a conference trip, which conferences are best for me to attend, and how to balance conference attendance with all the other responsibilities in my life. Although this trip was much shorter than the Maryland conference, I was still able to network with new McNair scholars from other University of Wisconsin schools throughout the day. It was also at this conference that I had my first opportunity to present the results of my first few weeks of research this summer. This was such a positive experience for me, and the feedback I received from my peers and our moderator have been very helpful in preparing for later presentations I look forward to attending in the coming months: the Family Promise of the Chippewa Valley Board of Directors meeting in September, our UWEC McNair Research Symposium in December, and the Celebration of Excellence in Research and Creative Activity in April.
Give & Take: A Sneak Peek of my SREU
July 5, 2024
Brief overview of the scope, methods, and progress for my current research project
Before:
Growing up in a working-class family introduced me initially to the social networks that make up and help support communities of low socioeconomic status. As I developed an understanding of the direction I wanted to take my future, I realized that economic stratification and communities, especially as they occur in urban settings, is something that I feel real passion for. By chance, I discovered homelessness advocacy in working part-time at a family shelter in Eau Claire called Family Promise of the Chippewa Valley: Beacon House. My first ethnography centered around the interactions among and between the families I served there, and opened my eyes both to my affinity for qualitative research and to my desire to focus on economic inequality in my work.
Currently:
This summer, I was lucky enough to secure funding through both the McNair program and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. Thanks to these new sources of income, I don’t have to work 70 hour work-weeks like I did last year, and I’ve been making use of every “free” second I have. This past month I have been splitting my time between visiting family from out-of-state, studying for the GRE and preparing my other application materials for the fall, and starting up the data collection phase of my summer research project. Although there were some unavoidable delays in the initial IRB submission, we were approved after just one round of revisions, and I was clear to begin data collection on June 24th.
So far, I have completed just eight hours of observations in Acoustic Café and Shift Cyclery and Coffee Bar. Eventually, I will complete 40 hours of observations and 10 interviews with “business stakeholders,” such as employees, managers, and owners, in a variety of for-profit businesses in the four Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in Eau Claire: Water Street, North Barstow, South Barstow, and West Grand Avenue. Due to the network-based nature of my research topic, my faculty mentor and I felt a snowball sample was the most appropriate way to guide the data collection. My starting point in this process, and the most fruitful location so far, was Acoustic Café, a coffee and sandwich shop that is open late and whose primary draw pre-pandemic was its constant array of live music.
Later:
I have made some exciting observations through my work already, and I look forward to publishing my findings in the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s McNair Scholars journal, Astra, as well as presenting them at CERCA in the spring of 2025. After this project, I hope to continue working with qualitative methods to answer questions regarding poverty, support networks, and communities in urban settings. This undergraduate research experience I am just now beginning to undertake is something that I believe is setting me up for success in post-graduate education, both because of the comfort I am developing with academia and research and the level of responsibility I have learned to manage as the Primary Investigator of my own project.
Behind the Research:
My Mentor & Me
March 30, 2024
Introducing my mentor, myself, and how our work began
My Mentor:
This past semester in the McNair program has taught me that behind every successful undergraduate research project is a strong mentor-mentee relationship. My advisor and faculty mentor is Dr. Peter Hart-Brinson, a professor for both the Department of Sociology and the Department of Communication/Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Dr. Hart-Brinson earned his Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from UW-Madison in 2010 with a concentration in culture and politics. He is the president of the academic staff and faculty union, an advisor to UWEC's chapter of Alpha Kappa Delta (a national honor society for sociology students), and a member of various committees from both of his departments.
Myself:
I had the great luck to meet Dr. Hart-Brinson at a documentary screening and discussion event put on by the sociology department in my first year at UWEC in 2021. At that point in my academic career, I had no interest whatsoever in doing research. I originally intended to apply my degree majoring in sociology and minoring in Spanish with a legal studies certificate to going to law school and becoming an attorney. Through my mentor's guidance, and my own experiences working at Family Promise of the Chippewa Valley-Beacon House, however, I realized that my passion for sociology goes beyond my initial desire to practice civil rights law. As much as I stubbornly resisted the idea of changing my plans at the start of this journey, I ultimately couldn't ignore the allure of community and urban sociology and qualitative research. Now, my goal is to become a professor of sociology so I can continue my research and help others to see the beauty of sociological study.
Where it all began:
After leaving the documentary event more amazed with Dr. Hart-Brinson’s fluency in interdisciplinary discussion than the documentary itself, I reached out to see how soon I could be his student. In a truly impressive combination of circumstances, including odd-year course offerings and two different international education experiences, I was unable to get myself in a classroom with Dr. Hart-Brinson again for more than a year. My first experience conducting research in higher education was with him in his course on cultural sociology. For my final project, I completed a six-week, 10-page ethnography on the social dynamics of FPCV-Beacon House, which won the Rowan Award for Advanced Achievement in Sociology. This research experience, in part, sparked the new direction my research takes now. With this next project, I will be investigating the role that interactions between unhoused people and business stakeholders have on the social construction and conception of community safety and "safe spaces."
Where we are now:
Although that first research experience in FPCV-Beacon House was absolutely integral in the direction I am taking with my academic career now, my insistence on continuing research was just as impacted by the incredible support that Dr. Hart-Brinson has provided me. Even before embarking on our research together, we met frequently to discuss classes, hobbies, research, and graduate school. In fact, his encouragement was what first allowed me to think about graduate school for myself. Dr. Hart-Brinson lent me various sociological works from his own collection which empowered me to decide for myself where I want to direct my academic journey. Of these works, I credit Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk (pictured to the left) in particular for the lightning bolt realization that higher education in community and urban sociology is just the intellectual niche I was searching for. I hope to model my research after Mitchell Duneier's and my pedagogy after Dr. Hart-Brinson’s one day.