How/Why Research? When I first arrived at Carolina, I knew I wanted to get involved in research, as it was something I did not have much prior experience with. I reached out to faculty in the Department of Political Science who were conducting research that I was interested in and asked them if they had available positions for undergraduate assistants. I soon began to work with Professor Sarah Treul Roberts and her team of researchers on their ongoing project. From this experience, I have learned how to apply the knowledge I have gained from my coursework to a practical endeavor. After becoming more familiarized with the research process, I decided to pursue research of my own in my senior year by writing an honors thesis.
Research Experiences: As a research assistant for Professor Sarah Treul Roberts in the Department of Political Science, I work with a team of undergraduate and graduate students to collect data for an ongoing project that seeks to study the candidates for congress over time. More specifically, my role is to help encode information from the biography and issue pages of the candidates’ websites that will later be used for analysis. I am also working on my honors thesis, which focuses on the relationships between minimum wage and local cost of living in US cities. More specifically, I am researching the extent to which these relationships can predict economic well-being of low-income groups.