Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program
Spring 2016
Undergraduate students: please pick your top three choices from the following list of graduate
mentors and projects. As part of your letter of interest, please name the graduate mentor and
provide a brief essay as to why you have picked those three.
Graduate Mentor
Kylee Britzman
Department
Political Science
Jeanne Brunner
Educational Psychology
Sarai Coba
Rodriguez
Human and Community
Development
Emily DiFilippo
Spanish Literature and
Culture
Project
My dissertation project examines patterns of political
information and changing levels of political knowledge
through online social networking websites like
Facebook. I specifically compare how individuals who
rely primarily on Facebook to get their news and learn
about current events compare to individuals who only
use Facebook as a secondary source and instead rely
primarily on traditional news outlets like newspapers
and television. Student researcher will participate in
both qualitative and quantitative aspects of survey
research and in-depth interviews being conducted,
including working with large survey datasets, and
facilitation and transcription of interviews.
My dissertation project focuses on supporting
elementary teachers to teach the nature of science.
Data sources for this research include measuring
teachers’ practice, teachers’ views of nature of
science, and students’ learning of nature of science.
Undergraduate student researcher will assist with data
management, coding qualitative and quantitative data,
and data analysis.
This project involves working with low-income Latina
mothers of preschoolers in a Head Start program to
explore parental involvement and its influence on
school readiness. The undergraduate apprentice will
have hands-on training in employing qualitative
research to address the social issue of school readiness
and parental involvement and translating research into
practice. More specifically, the student will assist in
constructing literature reviews, transcribing and
coding interviews and focus groups, analyzing data,
and preparing workshop and conference materials.
My project explores disability as a divergence from
concepts of “normalcy” in the literary and cultural
production of contemporary Spain, and draws from a
variety of sources, including traditional literary
production as well as graphic novels, film, and cultural
artifacts such as periodicals, websites and other print
Katherine Flowers
English/Writing Studies
Amelia Kimball
Linguistics
Quinn Lewis
Geography and GIS
materials. Student researcher will help convert and
organize archival materials, help catalog files for
bibliography, as well as research/identify other source
material from both digital and UIUC library archives.
In my dissertation, “Local Language Policy: Shifting
Scales in the English Only Movement,” I argue that the
local scale is increasingly important to people’s legal
and political perspectives on language, but that it is
also a flexible, contested concept that is always
ideologically and materially linked to other scales. I am
particularly interested in how people decide (and
dispute) what it means for people, policies, and
languages to be local in relation to nationalism and
globalization. The undergraduate researcher will gain
experience with multiple phases of the research
process. This opportunity would be most fruitful for a
student interested in English, writing studies, discourse
analysis, and/or sociolinguistics, but also valuable for
students in history, communication, anthropology,
political science, pre-law, or related fields.
My project investigates memory for speech and will
consist of several experiments in which memory for
the details of a spoken word or sentence are tested.
Participants in the experiments will hear short clips of
speech, and be asked to remember them after a short
time delay. This project involves: designing and
recording speech stimuli in a recording booth, building
experiments in an online survey format (such as Survey
Monkey or Qualtrics), collecting and cleaning data that
is output by the survey program, creating figures of
results, conducting statistical analyses of the data, and
writing up the results.
As a physical geographer I work in an interdisciplinary
environment that includes geologists, ecologists, and
civil engineers, which will expose the undergraduate to
a diverse set of perspectives on research. The project
itself examines flow mixing at stream confluences –
locations in river systems where two streams combine
to form a single stream. Stream confluences are
hotspots for mixing of water, sediment, and pollution
in river systems. The undergraduate student will be
involved both in data collection and data analysis
components of the research, learn how to operate
research equipment, successfully collect and help
analyze high quality data in the field, and work as a
member of a research team. The student will also
engage with published literature to become familiar
with the conceptual context of the research.
Coral Lumbley
English
Ishva Minefee
Business
Ruchi Singh
Economics
My dissertation will examine how Welsh and AngloNorman writers of the early Middle English period
engage with the Norman imperialist project in twelfthcentury Britain and beyond. Using historiographic,
ethnographic, and romantic texts from the twelfthcentury, I will explore the ongoing tension between
Welsh desire for free cultural expression and political
independence and English colonial fantasy in medieval
Britain.
The undergraduate researcher will gain valuable
experience working with modern libraries, searching
for hard copies of texts that may or may not be readily
available. S/he will also: conduct and appraise
electronic journal sources; help collect digital
facsimiles of pertinent medieval manuscripts; develop
an organized bibliography. Particularly suited to
students interested in formations of ethnic identity,
mechanisms of empire-building, as well as students
interested in issues of translation or languages besides
English.
This project integrates international business and
sociology to understand how social movement
organizations pressure multinational corporations to
change controversial practices. Specifically, the
undergraduate apprentice and I will examine the
recent anti-soda campaign launched against Coca-Cola
due to the sugar content in many of its drinks. The
apprentice will receive hands-on training in the
analysis of visual (i.e., film) and textual rhetoric as well
as writing for academic publication. The project entails
an opportunity for the apprentice to receive coauthorship on the final manuscript.
As part of my dissertation, I plan to analyze natural
disasters (like hurricanes, wildfires, tsunamis, volcano
eruptions etc.) and the associated risks in the US.
Student researcher will help in literature review,
cleaning, and initial analysis of data.