Students in Emory's Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) have been hard at work in classrooms, labs, and libraries all across campus. For this "Why Research Wednesday," we are thrilled to share one of our SURE participant's stories.
Linda Cho is an Emory student on the pre-medical track, majoring in biology and minoring in English. This summer, she is conducting research in the field of psychology. Her current project is Post Encoding Arousal Memory Measures.
Cho's research is through the Hamann Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, which she joined at the end of the spring semester of her freshman year after cold emailing and interviewing several professors. She has been working in this lab for two and a half years. During her search, Cho focused on finding research labs that aligned well with her interests. She was interested in emotion and memory separately, so this lab caught her eye because it offered research opportunities in both areas.
For Cho, being involved in research certainly has its benefits. While she enjoys being in the lab, one of her favorite parts of research is meeting new people with similar interests, especially graduate students who are deeply dedicated to this research. Cho finds it inspiring to see people who are passionate about their research and devote themselves to learning as much as they can about a particular topic.
Research is certainly not without its challenges, as Cho knows well. The pandemic has caused many labs to prioritize virtual research, which can be limiting. Because Cho's research is built upon qualitative data, her lab has been able to conduct studies with participants over Zoom. However, they cannot obtain the observation components (body language, eye gaze) like they used before the pandemic with in-person interviews.
Challenges like these have strengthened Cho's abilities as a researcher. She recounts that she has been better able to problem-solve by incorporating different disciplines into research methods and topics. If the results differ from her expectations, she has learned to problem-solve effectively by utilizing prior literature reviews.
Cho's current goal is to continue developing her problem-solving skills to think of different perspectives to answer questions. For example, she wants to do literature reviews and incorporate her readings into her work. Cho's goals for the future include medical school, and she knows that research would help her to become a more knowledgeable and capable physician when encountering different types of diseases and case studies.
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