Final Project Frenzy
As of 9:30 this morning, I am officially done with the first semester of my senior year. (That right there is a scary sentence.) This semester, I only had one actual final, which translates to a lot of final projects. I actually enjoyed working on (most of) them, so I thought I’d give y’all a quick rundown on what they each were all about:
Managerial Accounting: The culmination of a semester of accounting was a budget case study in which we were given information about a company and had to create all of the budgets associated with it. It took a heck of a long time to finish, but I enjoyed the feeling of having completed something from scratch instead of just answering problems like on usual homework assignments.
Principles of Experimental Design: We spent the majority of the semester in this class learning about what makes good psychological experiment and designing our own in groups. For our final project, we had to present our experiment to the class and write a final paper reporting our results. The theory that my group tested was the idea that a volunteer will be more productive than someone who is forced to do something. Sadly our experiment did not yield any statistically significant results, but I definitely learned a whole lot about designing experiments!
Psychology of Thinking: For my final project in this class, we had to present recent research in cognitive psychology. My friend and I presented an article on whether or not objects that are difficult to move in real life are also more difficult to move in our minds–turns out they are, but only when you imagine that you are physically moving the item yourself, not when you imagine the object moving on its own.
Theories of the Body: For this Medicine, Health, and Society class, we were able to pick any topic we wanted that was related to class content and could either write a research paper or do an alternative project. I chose to write a paper on freak shows in popular culture. Essentially, people think that sideshows that profit off of ‘freaks’ are a thing of the past, but I argued that reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Toddlers & Tiaras are modern day freak shows that allow viewers at home to be secure in their normality. It was possibly the best paper I’ve written in my time at Vanderbilt–mostly because I found the research to be so interesting!
