A Letter to Your Future Self – Paige Bost

Future Paige, 

I am really excited to participate in the Women and Gender Summer Fellowship Program and gain incredibly valuable skills and experience! Although we have done research in the past, this will be our first full-time (and paid) research experience. I am excited to be working with Praxis Lab over the summer, and I expect that I will be able to choose my projects based on my interests and what research is currently ongoing. I think that I will likely focus on data analysis and writing, which is exciting for me because I have not contributed to any research papers before.

I hope to gain many new skills through the Fellowship Program. I think that the structured elements of the program will help me learn more about research methods and connect with other scholars. I hope that the program workshops help me learn new skills like Excel and SPSS, and sharpen my statistics and online research skills. I hope that I come out of the program with concrete accomplishments like completing a poster presentation for the Symposium and adding to my CV, but also skills that I can apply to other research projects in the future. 

I expect that this Fellowship will challenge me in a lot of ways. I have never done research for 30 hours/week before, and at first that seems a little daunting. I also think that contributing to papers and creating my own poster presentation will be tough because I have never done those tasks before. Despite the difficulties I anticipate, I believe that I am up for the challenge. I do have skills that I am already bringing into the summer that I believe will strengthen and benefit my research project. I have worked on four research projects before and most of those have similar focuses to what I will be working on with Praxis Lab, so I understand generally what it is like to work on research projects and the effort and reliability that they require. I also have already acquired some of the skills that I will need for my summer research project, such as Zotero, Google Scholar, and being able to perform qualitative data analysis, which should benefit my research project. 

Overall, I believe that WAGSFP will be a challenging, fascinating, and motivating experience, and I am looking forward to doing research! 

Sincerely, 

Past Paige