Advice

   A piece of advice to incoming students would be to make sure you start working on your research project as soon as possible.  Ten weeks seems like it's going to be a long time, but the end of the quarter comes up on you quicker than a nascar fan puts on jean shorts.  In order to combat this problem it is imperative to start your project as soon as possible.  Another piece of golden advice that I want to emphasize is to put your survey through one extra trial run.  I realize only one trial run is what is expected, and you probably will feel like your survey is 10 times better after the first trial run and revision (because it is) but there are going to be a lot of little things that you could do to tighten up your survey that you won't catch in the first trial run.  Those little things add up on such a large project like this one and could adversely impact your final grade.  So, under the condition that you have put in the time and have constructed a decent survey, an extra 30 minutes on a tuesday evening could very well be the difference between an A and a B.  Also, make sure to collect a lot of numerical data because categorical data (yes/no, pass/fail) is only so useful for this project.

  An interesting idea for this research project could be to measure the socializing of K students based on what dorm they live in.  To do this you could measure how long K students spend with others from different dorms and how many friends they have who don't live in their dorm.