Advice

For future students I would say that you should survey people electronically and send out surveys to at least 300 people. Our response rate was about 30% so that will get you about 90 surveys. You might actually want to survey more than 300 people just to be safe. You might also want to go over the research project with the professor Stull before submitting it and make sure your project addresses everything the professor is looking for. Make sure you start early and make steady progress every week so that you won’t have to rush and finish the whole 50 page project all a day before the deadline. Having a reliable partner will help do this so make sure you don’t pick a partner who might drop the class, rendering you entirely responsible for the project.

Choose a research project that you are interested in and that will benefit the Kalamazoo College community. In my case that was studying the relationship between sleep quantity and sleep quality and academic performance of K students. Doing the research project I also thought of another possible research topic related to student academic performance. I read an article recently that a student’s with more educated parents will be more likely to do better in school and such a relationship existed even before the student entered first grade. This might be an interesting area to study.