Know Your Community– Share With Your Community!

By: Vivian Hoang

Research has a reputation for being a solitary post. You come up with a hypothesis, stage your conditions, run the experiment, analyze, and report. Hardly ever do people imagine the lone researcher conferring with others during any of these steps, much less working with anyone in the first place. My friends and I joke often about going into research to avoid social interaction, but from my experience so far in the REACH lab, this has been far from the truth! 

From my first in-person meeting with my lab members and Professor Yang, I knew that I would not be alone in my research. We began the meeting sharing not just our names, but our hopes for the future, what got us into research, and our shared passions. Even though I was pursuing a different major from everyone else, I felt like I could reach out to my fellow research assistants about any questions I had about Psychology, research, or being in a lab. 

My first big assignment was creating a research poster from a previous research assistant’s findings– this was the first time I had even seen a research poster in a psychology context, so you can imagine how nervous I was to take this project on. Luckily for me, I was assigned this poster with a fellow research assistant from the lab. I still remember working on our laptops in the lab meeting space, giggling over fonts and silly layouts we came up with. When either person was stuck on a particular aspect of the poster or struggling to understand parts of the paper, the other person served as a sounding board to bounce ideas off of. She also served as a point of morale for me when I found myself lacking motivation! I think we wrote a funny note on the lab space whiteboard, which is still up to this day! Being able to work with another research assistant for my first assignment really affirmed the fact that in the REACH lab, I wouldn’t be alone in my work. 

I look fondly back on another experience with my other REACH labbies in which three of us recently traveled to Tacoma, Washington for the Western Psychology ASsociation (WPA) Conference. It was my first time traveling to Washington, and also my first time presenting a poster presentation at a conference. I count myself lucky to share this experience with two other peers that had the same amount of experience as me. I not only was lent their support, but their friendship during that week! We were able to get to know each other deeper, and thus felt closer as a research lab as a result of that trip. 

I can’t stress enough how important it is to reach out to the others who work in the same sphere as you– your peers and fellow research students are more often than not going through the same problems you are, and can offer you either comfort or nuggets of wisdom. Research doesn’t have to be a solitary activity, and sharing research findings doesn't have to be the only collaborative step of the process. We are all in this to find and discuss new ideas– your peers have so much to offer if you give them the chance.