Advice

Really the only thing that I can say that hasn't been said already (to my knowledge) is, "Make sure to get a partner".

I was one of the very, very few people in the class not to have a partner for the project. I thought I would be fine on my own, but in retrospect it would've been really helpful to have some... help. Collecting the data alone took up so much time. Granted, I was lazy, but it wasn't until the end of eighth week that I had all my data in; and I only ended up with 28 samples!

So be sure to have a partner, and be on top of things.

I guess you should also know exactly what you're doing with your research. My topic was very broad and conclusions were hard to draw from. Be specific, and make sure your questions are specific.

Advice (even though you might just have to learn the hard way)

Okay.  Everyone is going to tell you the same advice.  You already know what that is.  But there is nothing we can say to make you do it.  It's one of those lessons that you may have to learn on your own and then slap yourself in the head during the all-nighter that you pull before the project is due.

I remember being in your position, reading the comments on the blog re: advice, thinking that I am not going to be that student, that I will be okay with time.  Wrong.  This project needs time.  I did not give it the time it deserved, and therefore I did not receive the grade I wanted (to my defense, I was overloading that quarter, so I probably did not have the time required for the project... yet that is still an unacceptable excuse).

So, Student.  Get started on the project-- now.  Plan out small goals as to what you want to conquer that week.  Even though I am bad at my own advice, I am getting better and these methods do help.

Also, focus on the statistical analysis.  I put all of my brain power and energy into the discussion and introduction, because that was what I was interested in (my project was on the labor movement and college students' opinions on labor unions and workers' rights today).  However, this is a stats class.  And Chuck really cares about the stats over any labor history.

Another topic for a research project could be the satisfaction of K students and their majors.
I know I am very displeased with the K College Spanish department.  I would love to have the opportunity to undergo another study and ask K students what they think is important about a Spanish Major and what topics do they think Spanish majors should cover in class (because I do not think it should revolve around literature or a particular writer, which it does).

Regardless of the topic, Chuck is really correct when he says study something that you're interested in.  Because I am all about the labor movement (I worked as a union organizer for the U.A.W.) and even I did not spend enough time on my project.  And I always am fond of studying something that is useful and needed.  To brainstorm, just think about the things you want to fix at K and then develop some questions that you can ask people about.  Bam.

Advice for future students

            My advice for future students would be to not be worried about the project and trust yourself that you know the information. It is a great extra toll to help understand the basics of the class. I encourage students to begin surveying and recording information as soon as possible because it isn’t fun to cram last minute. I would also spend time messing around and learning how to use excel properly because if you don’t know the ins and outs of excel it can add a lot of unnecessary time on working on the project.

            A possible option for future projects could be testing the use of the weight room and whether or not it would be beneficial to improve the weight room equipment. I had a similar idea in mind before continuing with my favorite bar campaign. Surveying K college students was easily accessible and gave us a large enough sample to conduct a proper survey.  

Advice for Future Students

To all future students who take this class, the best advice I can give you is to make sure you have a really good idea from the get go on what your main question/topic is. Also, you should spend a good amount of time really formulating the who(are you surveying), what(do you want to answer), and how(are your going to go about/test it) of your survey. The longer you spend "perfecting" your survey and the more people you test it on, the better off you will be in the long run because if you have a crappy survey, it is just going to make the testing and putting all of the data into excel just that much more difficult. Also, even though everyone knows how busy K students are, really try to put some effort and time into getting a LARGE and RANDOM sample because the larger and more randomized it is, the more likely that your conclusions are going to actually be relevant which = you didn't just put a lot of effort into something that has no point and/or doesn't even answer your main question which =     : D

Future topic:
How much alcohol do K students consume, what are their drink(s) of choice, and how much are they willing to spend on alcohol (priorities)?

Advice for future students

I would strongly recommend spending a lot of time in the early stages of this project making sure you have a base of solid questions and ideas before you make your survey. The longer you spend working on the design and the questions in your survey the easier the rest of the project is going to be. Also try to make sure that whatever topic you find the topic you choose interesting because it will make it a lot easier to carry on with the project if you actually want to work on it.

Possible topic:

Caffein intake of the average student on the Kalamazoo College campus.

Advice for Future Students

There are a couple things that I'd like to recommend for students doing this research project in the future. First, make sure the wording in your survey is such that the question can't be misinterpreted. Otherwise, you can get skewed results. Also, don't wait until the last minute to start your calculations. This was the part that probably took us the longest. They're going to take you much longer than expected. Lastly, I wouldn't recommend using a site like surveymonkey.com, and the sending the survey out to students. We tried using this method and got a very low response rate.

I think an interesting topic could be one in which the idea expands on what we studied with textbooks and spending. I think it would be cool to go more in depth with this and study textbook spending not just in general with students at K, but take a look at spending by major, and look to see who spends the most on books, what majors buy their books where, etc.

Advice for future students

I would like to strongly suggest future students to put their time on designing a survey. Obviously, there was a reason that survey had to be revised twice as it's the most important step in whole survey. Especially, making survey questions! Consider how long it takes and how you can use that question to draw conclusion. And as all the others already said, start the project as early as possible and be ahead of deadlines all the time. 

Possible Topic

College students' spending habits in certain schools - maybe K, WMU and KVCC

Choose something YOU are interested in! It will be NOT FUN if you have to write 20-30 pages report about something boring. 

Project Advice

Some advice that I would spread to the future students is to spread your project over the course of the quarter. Figure out a topic early and brainstorm questions and ideas towards what you think could bring connections and data. The online survey is a good idea although there are many limitations to the programs available without payment. Staying on top of deadlines is key to the project, it will help you greatly at the end when the final pieces are due.

Topics that I would say are good for future research are anything related to the school that students or faculty see as current issues to gain insight on. Also, finding out different opinions among varying demographics or groups is good for comparisons. Since the K population will probably be where you get your sample, find themes for your project which impact immediate school decisions or recent policies that were implemented.  Stepping outside the box and talking to local restaurants or businesses, you could maybe do a project for them on satisfaction. This would bring a different sample and also provide beneficial information for the restaurant/business. 

Advice for future students

My advice for future students in this class would be to start as early as possible on the project. It may take days or even weeks to get enough data once you start surveying people. If you start on this portion of the project early enough, you will probably have a large part of your project done by the time the preliminary results are due. Also, it is definitely a good idea to enter your data into Excel as you go. If you do a few at a time, it’s more manageable than trying to do it all at once. Finally, I would spend some time learning how to use Excel. You can save yourself a lot of time if you figure out how to do descriptive statistics, formulas, and other shortcuts in Excel rather than doing them by hand.

In terms of future project topics, I would consider surveying Kalamazoo College students about their work, study, eating, exercising habits, etc. I found surveying K students to be a good idea because you will have a large population to select from, and the college’s email and campus mail systems make it easy to contact large numbers of people at once. 

Advice for future students

I would suggest using your time wisely on this project. The deadlines are very helpful in staying on top of everything, but from the point of sending out your surveys to turning in your paper it is your job to manage your time. Start the data entry early, it takes way longer than you would expect. Also, do not use Survey Monkey unless you are sure you're okay with the restrictions. It only allows you to ask 10 questions and only see responses from 100 people, it is very frustrating to get 173 responses and only be able to see 100 of them.  Also, if you have any problems with the project, ask the professor, they're always willing to help and give good advice.

An interesting topic to look into would be music habits at K. What type of music people are listening too, how many hours, what are they listening on, did they buy or download the music, etc.

Wisdom

As far as advice would go, I suggest staying on top of your surveying. When you go throughout the quarter meeting deadlines for this project you can easily be fooled into a false sense of ease when the next deadline is not for two weeks. Do not be fooled that you will need all of this time to not only set up your surveys but to also put the data into excel. Another thing, do not try and figure out excel all on your own. Work in teams and if confused about excel ask the professor. They are more than willing to help and this will save you a lot of time in regards to calculations. Excel is a wonderful tool when doing this project and you should try and use it to the best of your advantage. 

I would suggest the topic of looking at college students that stay up past 1:30 am-2 am on a regular basis. I think this could be very interesting because you could find out how priorities rank in their day and see what kind of results stem from these different sleeping patterns. Then try and relate these sleeping patterns to what kind of jobs they might want to get once graduated. It could lead to a fun and interesting project looking at what area of academics has what trends. 

Advice

     My advice to all future students is start this project earlier. Don't ever procrastinate. There are a lot of work, so you have to use your time wisely because there will be works from other classes. Having a partner makes this project so much easier. With your partner, you should brainstorm and get the most creative, the best idea. Getting the random sample is very important. I struggled with this, but you will be able to do your best to make your sample random.
   
     I would suggest a research project on the relationship between students and their caffeine consumption. Possibly, which major spend the most money? Good luck with this project!

Advice

To all future students, use your time wisely.  This project is a lot of work and will take a lot of time.  Obtaining results to your surveys can take many days so make sure you have a large enough sample to work with.  Not everyone will answer either.  The paper is the hardest part of the project, so make sure you start as early as you can on that.  Also, try to work with a partner as this project involves lots of work for just one person to do.

Topics
I would suggest doing a project on majors that people are taking or something involving cafe food.

Some thoughts on surveys

My advice to any one attempting to do this project would be to anticipate the results of the survey before distributing it. Are people actually going to know how to respond to these questions or would they even be comfortable with them? Is the topic beyond the scope of an average K College student? Also many underclassmen are not as informed as the majority of the upperclassmen, and selecting the entire campus as the target audience may not yield the best results; many surveys could come up incomplete or be missing key information.

As far as possible topics go try thinking of your favorite extracurricular interest and possibly work it into a topic that would be applicable to a business orientated survey.
Some suggestions are:
-How well can the average student at K handle the costs of having a car on campus?
-How much does the ten year (or five year) plan for the college matter to the students currently enrolled?

Advice and Topics

Advice:

     For future students taking this course, use your time to your advantage. From the first week you will start getting information on what the requirements on the project are and what the deadlines for the project will be. As most things at K go, your class workload definitely tend to pile up towards the end of the quarter. By utilizing your time early on, it is going to free you up and allow you to go over your project in detail. Also, you will not have as much stress as some of your other classmates that will be pulling all-nighters before the day the project is due. My partner and I took this approach after hearing this advice over and over from other students that took the class, and it was definitely worth it! And lastly, I strongly recommend that you find a partner. Some of my friends did the research project by themselves and were overwhelmed way more than they should have been. So, food for thought.

Topics:

1. Comparing study time between Athletes and Non-Athletes

2. Parking on campus (always an interesting topic)

3. Why people decided to come to K

4. Thoughts on if students support the new Athletic Field renovations 

Advice For Future Students

I would advise future students to start working on their project as early as possible in order to give them plenty of time to compile and analyze their data. I would also suggest that they figure out how to do all of the equations on Excel as early as possible in order to make the data section of the final paper as easy as possible. I would also suggest that students take good notes during class as they can be a good reference throughout the project process and when reviewing for the exams. I would also advise students to work with a partner, you can divide the work and it helps having someone else to refer to when you're confused or unsure.

Some interesting future projects could be student caffeine consumption, average spending on books, and satisfaction with on-campus food (caf, stacks, and biggbys)

Advice to Future Students

My advice to future students doing this project would be to make sure you do each part with your partner. Don't divide up the work and each do only some parts, because then you won't have as much practice for the exam, and it will hurt your grade. Also, don't be afraid to go ask Chuck questions because it helps a lot. Better to ask him than get something wrong.

A new topic I might suggest for next year would be something involving the cafeteria food. Maybe how satisfied students are with the food or if they would like to see something improved. I think you could get a good feedback because you could focus on people specifically who eat in the caf.

Advice & Topics

Advice:

For future students I would first suggest to start doing everything early, it leaves much more time for editing or finding solutions to unforeseen problems that may come up. This can apply to all parts of the project, but especially the paper, because it will end up taking much longer than you might think.
I would also suggest to do thorough work on the early assignments for the project, especially the one focusing on finding other sources, as that will help speed up the process of writing the paper when you get to that point. Lastly, I would definitely recommend working with a partner, because this is a long project with a lot of work, and it would help to be able to divide up the work.

Topics:
1. Why people chose the major that they did, and how many hours of work per week each major does.
2. Compare the majors of athletes and non-athletes
3. Compare the social lives of athletes vs. non-athletes, between dorms, between classes, etc.

Advice and Possible Topics

My Advice

I would advise you future students to take the assignments about the project very seriously because they come in handy when writing out the final project. (Especially the assignment where you have to find outside resources) If you already have these resources and numbers, then your hypothesis tests will be easier to finish for the project. Another piece of advice is that if you are going for a large sample size, ask people in person to fill out your survey because people are more likely to do it when they are facing a real person. Going for a large sample size however is not the most important thing!! When it comes down to it, you are better off focusing your time on making sure your calculations, your regressions, and your analysis are done perfectly. You only get 5 extra points for a large sample size; it would suck to lose points on other parts of the project for those 5 points. Also, choose a partner you can actually work with and don’t be afraid to hold them accountable for their part. Last thing, start at least 4 days before it’s due and go into Chuck’s office/call him as much as you need to. Nothing’s worse than thinking you’re doing everything right and then asking the day before and finding out you need to do something over. Start early and give yourself lots of time to bug Chuck. I know the project seems like a huge stressor, and it is, but it is actually kind of cool once you finish and see what your research found.

Possible Topics

You could study student spending, student sleep habits, student caffeine intake, student eating habits, or all those for professors; you could compare any of these things to Western students. You could study which major costs the most in terms of money on classes and study time and then ask alumni their majors and salaries, and see if the costs are worth it. 

Advice for future students

Advice for future Business Statistics students

I recommend that as soon as you receive anything that has to do with the project you do it as soon as possible because if you put it off it can become real stressful. Early in the quarter the project isn’t that stressful but it gets worse towards the end of the quarter, so make sure to stay on top of the early assignments. If you work on the project little by little and not all at one time then you’ll be in good shape.

            It’s better to start early when it’s time to type up the whole project because that way you can ask your professor questions if you are unsure about anything.

           

My class was given the choice of working in a group or alone and I recommend that if you are given the same choice you choose a partner because this project is long and tedious enough already so you want someone to split up the work with so it will be a lot easier.

Possible topics

-       - Professor’s salaries in different departments.

-       - Which stores do K students most frequently visit?

-       - Where K students spend most of their Munch Money and which other restaurants should Munch Money include?