College, in Retrospect

Boomer! I recently graduated from the University of Oklahoma with my B.S. in Psychology with Honors, Summa Cum Laude, with Minors in Computer Science and Music, and a certificate in Applied Statistics. Apparently, the longer it takes you to say your degree and all relevant qualifications, the more impressive it is, so that’s why I get to look really pretentious whenever I list it on an application. (No fair! Multidisciplinary Studies: Concentration in Public Promotion & Social Perception majors have such an advantage!)

As I recover from my typical post-semester mental collapse (read: playing the Pokémon video games for 11hrs/day all week), I thought it would be good to reflect on the different stages of my college journey and consider the events that led me to the place I’m at. Buckle up.

The beginnings

What drew me to OU in the first place? Basically, money. The first big thing to realize about me is that I was not always the shining exemplary student that I obviously am today. In high school, I didn’t place much weight on the college admissions process. I didn’t totally understand the gravitas of accepting an offer, and I didn’t have a comprehensive grasp of the full cost of tuition, loans, and living fees. So, I took it easy. I tossed my hat in the ring with big name schools like Stanford and MIT (wait-listed, technically), but didn’t try extremely hard to get in. I didn’t even tour anywhere - other than briefly visiting OU for a piano audition. I wanted to both be a therapist and continue playing, so my listed degrees were psychology and piano.

I got an offer from OU, but I kept dragging my feet about accepting. The longer I put it off, the sweeter the deal got. They kept eliminating various costs like the application fee or first-semester fees, so I just kept waiting to see how much money I could save by procrastinating. Finally, the day that responses were due, I formally accepted the offer from OU due to the National Merit scholarship package and acceptance to their piano program.

The death of the piano dream

To be fair, I technically lasted more than 1 semester as a piano major. After my first juries, my teacher Dr. John Patrick Murphy sat me down and asked if I fully understood the standards for daily practice expected of piano majors throughout college (Spoiler: I did not). By your junior/senior year, around 4 hours/day piano practice was expected. Some of my friends (read: Aidan Sudler) may have been talented enough to exist in such an environment, but I who was struggling to even practice 1hr/day was not. So, I decided to relegate the study of music to a vocal minor, and focus on psychology.

The first year of college also held many non-academic developments that were incredibly impactful. Notably, I discovered a wealth of social connections and amazing friends that uplifted and enriched my freshman year. I started college in 2020: right in the peak of COVID. During this time, most classes were online, and many in-person events were shut down. Luckily, I had groups such as:

• The guys in my dorm hall (Couch 6W)
• The girls on the other side of the dorm floor
• The David L. Boren dorm people
• The guys in Sigma Alpha Mu (Go SAMMY)
• The other music students
• The people in Campus Activities Council
• The people who worked in the Gender + Equality Center

All of these groups were incredibly influential in shaping my first-year college development. Socially, many of the first groups listed helped me feel welcomed and accepted on campus. Professionally, my interaction with the last two groups paved the way for involvement that would occur my sophomore/junior year.

Many of the first things I did on campus were either for or concerned with the frat Sigma Alpha Mu. As a freshman, I was adamant about not joining a fraternity. I did not have a positive perception of frat guys, and didn’t jive with the flavor of masculinity expressed in many greek spaces. However, I probably watched Monsters University too many times, and eventually became curious about greek life. What eventually convinced me to join was the fact that a new fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu (or Sammy, for short) was getting founded on campus the year that I was rushing. The representative from SAM headquarters who was founding the chapter at OU marketed it as a frat for non-frat-guys, where the founding fathers would get to play a role in shaping a culture in the fraternity that was different from many other houses. I figured this sounded cool, so I joined as a founding father.

(Slight post interruption! I’m actually writing this next part from a coffee shop in downtown Budapest while sipping the most delicious espresso. Everything prior was written in the London Heathrow airport during a layover. Ok, travel update done - back to my schooling)

One of my favorite things Sammy did together was OU Scandals. Scandals is the name for OU’s yearly student-produced musical production (no, the name Scandals didn’t result from all of the drama that theatre kids love to make). Each year, various groups (typically fraternities and sororities) self-produce a short, 15-minute musical which is then performed at a large showcase. The cast of each show consists of a pairing of two specific groups (e.g., the sorority Gamma Phi Beta and the fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha), and the directors and leads are individual members from each group. When Sammy did Scandals, we paired with OU Class Council - a student government organization that performs some function I still don’t totally understand. I was both one of the artistic directors and one of the leads for our show, so I was tasked with writing some of the music and performing the role of the villain (my favorite song was an evil rendition of “You’re Welcome” from Moana). Overall, it was an incredibly fun experience, and I met some great people during the production.

That year, I also joined the leadership team of OUr Mental Health, a club dedicated to raising awareness and providing resources for mental health on campus. One of my personal highlights was facilitating a stress-relieving meditation night for a group of students during dead week. One girl fell asleep, so I consider my meditation facilitation a success.

2020-2021 Notable Classes/Professors:

• Piano: Fresh/Soph with Dr. John Patrick Murphy
• Elements of Psychology with Dr. Jenel Cavazos
• Aural Skills with Dr. Sarah Ellis
• Gateway: Fine Arts with Dr. Johnnie-Margaret McConnell
• Music in Culture with Dr. Zoe Sherinian

The campus life explosion

I still don’t know exactly what got into me, but the next two years of my college career were marked by my full immersion into any form of campus involvement I could find. There was a sort of snowball effect: the more things I got involved in, the more opportunities I would hear about. One of the things I love about OU is that many of the programs and events on campus are fully student-led, so there are nearly endless ways to get plugged in.

One of the major organizations I got involved with this year was the Gender + Equality Center (GEC). Holy moly, these people were amazing. All incoming freshmen at OU are required to take a federally-mandated consent training, and I had a great experience with mine. I was a bit of a snot-nosed incoming student, and I went into the training expecting to poke fun at it and not take it too seriously. However, the peer-educator moderator (Abby Tow, who later became one of my good friends in the GEC) was phenomenal, and I learned a lot about consent and how it is communicated. So, the next year I interviewed to become a peer educator for the GEC and was eventually accepted.

If I had to pick one organization that helped me develop professionally during my time at OU, it would be the GEC. All of the people I worked with and all of the bosses I had were amazing and really cared about their employees (Bliss Brown, Jerry Lessley, Quan Phan, Crissy Brown, Amber May, Erin Simpson, Ann Schaefer, to name a few). The team of peer educators was full of motivated students and I formed some lasting friendships. Overall, I can’t recommend it enough.

Alongside the GEC, I also got involved with Campus Activities Council (CAC). Remember earlier how I mentioned that most of the organizations at OU are student-led? CAC is the main hub for many of the major events, like OU Film Series and OU Concert Series (OU Scandals is also based out of the CAC). During the fall semester, I was an exec member of CAC College Bowl, an organization that hosted a large trivia tournament each year. I got involved with College Bowl because many of the girls I was friends with in the dorms were members, and it was a blast. Much like the GEC, the team of College Bowl exec members was super fun and close-knit, and the process of setting up and hosting the tournament was full of fun ideas and events.

In the spring, I was a vice chair for CAC Fall Family Weekend (FFW): the organization that hosts the yearly family visitation weekend at OU. I was in charge of reaching out to various other organizations to host events during the weekend, but the fantastic FFW chair Sarah Stringfield honestly did most of the work for me. It was fun, but I definitely gained a reputation for slacking off. 8/10.

Finally, I also was a Teaching Assistant to Dr. Jenel Cavazos for Elements of Psychology 1113 and to Stephanie Oakes for First-Year Foundations of Psychology 1002. Being a TA was great fun, and helped me gain experience in the classroom that was not purely being a student. Highlight of TA’ing: when I planned to host a end-of-the-year party for my group in Elements of Psychology, and was told that if I actually hosted an event with alcohol for undergraduates I would get fired and barred from TA’ing again. #TeamMilgramForLyfe

2021-2022 Notable Classes/Professors:

• Men’s Glee Club with Dr. David Howard
• Research Methods with Dr. Scott Gronlund
• Men and Masculinity with Dr. Rodney Bates
• Introduction to Personality with Dr. Eugenia Fuenzalida
• Beginning Spanish with Christian Doug

Research rumblings

Uh oh… you hear that? It’s the sound of the typical upperclassman realization that graduation is now sooner than later, and that you should probably figure out a semblance of a plan. Junior year is when I started reevaluating whether or not I actually wanted to be a therapist. It was sort of my “mid-life crisis” of college; I took cognitive psych and wanted to be a cognitive psychologist, I took virtue ethics and wanted to start a philosophy degree, I started working for my first research lab and REALLY wanted to do research. At the end of the day, this is the year that I first took Psych Test & Measurements with Dr. Robert Terry, and you only need read my graduate school application essays to know how pivotal this class was in getting me excited about quant psych.

My first research experience was working with Dr. Scott Gronlund in the OU Memory Lab. It was very fun! I was in charge of running participants for an experiment that aimed to determine how object memories were stored in the brain. Participants were given a list of items (objects like chairs, tables, lamps, etc.) to memorize, and they were asked to recall if certain inages (other objects) had been present in the list. The catch is that the cue images were either exact replicas of the object or the same TYPE of object (e.g., a lamp) with subtle variations. The theory is that if there was no significant difference in levels of observed change then people were storing objects conceptually rather than as a flashbulb image memory. Cool stuff.

My second research experience, during the spring semester, was working under Dr. Edward Cokely in the OU Decision Psychology Lab. The content was very cool, but I didn’t once interact with Dr. Cokely himself. He was completely hands-off with the undergraduates in the lab and tasked his grad students with managing us. I thought that was a little bit over-the-top, and I was sad that I never got to ask him questions about the material. The framework for this lab was that there exists a measure of intelligence–numeracy–that is more predictive of good decision making than any other measure of intelligence. This lab was an interesting experience. At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to express my questions, but I wresled with the concept of divergent validity with regard to numeracy and other measured forms of intelligence. I was also constantly curious about the methodology for how they determined that numeracy training makes someone a better decision maker overall. In the end, the experience turned sour as I accidentally missed showing up in the lab for a participant during dead week and was asked to step down as an assistant. Shhh! Don’t tell the people that read my CV!

This was the point at which I discovered quantitative psychology. During the spring of this year, I took Psych Test & Measurements with Dr. Robert Terry, which introduced me to the field. I spent a lot of time after class asking him questions I had from the other research I was involved in, and he eventually invited me to participate in OU’s Academic Success Center Research Team. I’ll get into specific quant stuff later, but this was my first foray into psych data science.

In terms of campus involvement, I was still plugged in. One of my favorite organizations I was a part of was Camp Crimson, for which I served as a Camp Guide. Camp Crimson is OU’s largely student-led freshman orientation camp, responsible for introducing new students to campus and hosting events before the semester such as Class Kick-off. Camp Guides are the individuals who run around making sure everything is running smoothly. We also get to do fun stuff such as being the hype men for competitions and leading excursions to attractions in OKC.

I continued my involvement in CAC and the GEC. At this point, I also started trying to make professional use of my involvement, so I volunteered to be a facilitator for peer support groups that met on campus to discuss stress and other facets of being a college student. It was very fulfilling. The ironic part about these groups, however, is that I honestly got as much use out of them as the students among whom I was supposed to be facilitating discussion. At this point in my college career, the pressure of everything I was involved in really started to affect me stress-wise, and I made the conscious decision to dial down the involvement for my senior year.

2022-2023 Notable Classes/Professors:

• Biblical Literature with Dr. Jill Hicks-Keeton
• Sociology of Family with Matthew Bejar
• Virtue Ethics with Dr. Adam Green
• Psych Test & Measurements with Dr. Robert Terry
• Voice with Matthew Corcoran

Honing in

Senior year is where I really started to focus on pursuing the aspirations that had developed in the last few semesters. The spark having been lit by Dr. Terry, the field of quantitative psychology was calling to me like no subject had ever before. As I conducted more research with my professors, I realized how much I might enjoy doing it as a career. Being able to watch them operate in the academic environment slowly became something that embodied where I wanted to be someday.

One funny story: As I started my senior year, I decided to try and attain a computer science minor during my last year (and a half) of college. I had been missing math and coding (shockingly) and I wanted to fold it back into my education. The funny thing about this ambition is that I was not even close to having the required math credits to start the CS track. CS starts with Calculus as a co-requisite for many coding classes, and the pre-requisites for Calc 1 are trig, geometry, alg, etc. The problem was: the psychology degree at OU only requires VERY basic math classes, and the only one I had taken was a “functions for the social sciences” class my first year that probably didn’t even count for credit in any program other than psychology. I had only gotten a 2 on the AP Calc BC exam in high school, which didn’t count for any credits either. So, I was stuck. I started emailing around, and the only way I was going to be able to take calc that semester was if I took the incoming student ALEKS math placement exam, which is the test given to freshmen who want to test out of intro-level math classes. The culmination of all of this context is that I ended up having to cram study the ENTIRE math sequence–alg, geometry, trig, and pre-calc–in a matter of 3 days to prepare for a placement exam. I am proud to announce that I successfully ended up relearning the entire high school math curriculum in 72 hours, and scored into the highest category of placement. So, I was able to start work on the CS minor.

I did Camp Crimson during the summer (OK WHO? OKU). Other than that, I wasn’t active in any organization on campus other than the GEC. This allowed me to focus heavily on research.

The bulk of my work focused on my honors thesis. At OU, in order to graduate with honors you must complete a thesis during your senior year over a topic of your choosing. I wanted my thesis to be in the form of a published research paper, so I reached out to and worked with Dr. Jenel Cavazos to plan, organize, and complete a full paper throughout the course of the year. The paper focused on AI use among college students; more information about it can be found here. More than anything, this project allowed me to realize that I wanted to continue my education into a PhD. The process of conducting review, developing a study, assessing results, and authoring a paper made me feel like I was at home, academically. I loved it–and learning that exact experience constituted a majority of grad school was enough for me to fully commit to the idea.

Alongside my senior thesis, I also conducted work on student retention data with Dr. Terry. I was tasked with assessing methods of handling missing data such as FIML and Multiple Imputations with Chained Equations. I recognize that the length of this post is starting to approach the upper limit of what I was hoping for, so I’ll forego explaining all the research specifics. Information about any particular project can be found here.

Overall, this year really was just a bunch of academics. It was SO, SO fun, though. More than anything, it opened my eyes to the opportunities that are available to individuals pursuing research. Some of my favorite memories from the year are from presenting my paper at conferences like SWPA or OPS (I won ‘Best Undergraduate Paper’ at one!). It helped me solidify my certainty that I was on a good path for me.

2023-2024 Notable Classes/Professors:

• Great Books of Western Civ with Dr. Robert Lifset
• Psychology Capstone with Dr. Robert Terry
• Discrete Structures with Dr. Lauren Grimley
• Stat Models of Tests Scores with Dr. Robert Terry
• Computer Organization with Dr. Mohammed Atiquzzaman

The home stretch

After all of the previous exposition, my super-senior semester didn’t really bring any new revelations. It was much a continuation of the previous developments, both academically and personally. My victory lap.

I realized this semester that I technically qualified for a certificate in Applied Statistics (which is basically a minor? Still not sure exactly what it means) due to all of the math/stats courses I had taken. One more qualification on my degree! Yay!

Alongside continuing some of the research I had previously done such as my work with Dr. Cavazos and work with Dr. Terry, I got involved with some oddball projects you might not expect. I started working with Dr. Lauren Grimley, one of my math professors, on math research involving the game of peg solitaire. The way I got involved on this project was as follows: I had Dr. Grimley for the class Discrete Structures the previous year, and I thought the class seemed really cool. I needed an honors credit still to graduate with honors, so I asked her if I could do an extra paper/project for the class to qualify it for honors credit. She seemed receptive to the idea, so we met to discuss potential ideas. After a while, she introduced me to this side project of hers looking at the solvability of various classic board games: peg solitaire being one of them. Through the project, we analyzed peg solitaire in 3 colors: the specifics of which can be found on my research tab. This was another project that resulted in a paper, which I am incredibly proud of. (One funny story: the Discrete class that Dr. Grimley taught was so difficult that the students staged a full revolution. The dean was so overwhelmed with complaints and with students visiting his office that he had to announce that something would be done and that they would investigate the class. For the record, I am completely on Dr. Grimley’s side, and think that the students were just complaining too much.)

Finally, I also worked for Dr. Eric Day to help modify a video game that he used for a lab assessing exploration and exploitation patterns in workplace learning. Again, I don’t want to just blandly describe all the various projects I was working on, but if you want to try a version of the game for yourself you can visit the following link: https://deeper-paths.firebaseapp.com/.

I could not have been happier with the classes I took my final semester. I took Linear Algebra (incredibly engaging), and also TA’d for Advanced Undergraduate Statistics taught by Catherine Bain (one of the graduate students who helped with my honors thesis, among other things). Alongside those classes, I also took Chinese Religions with Dr. Geoffrey Goble. Oh boy. What an adventure. This class was structured such that the second half of the semester was purely dedicated to a massive roleplaying game that took place in-class. The main focus of the class was assessing the impact of the religions of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism throughout Chinese history, and the game featured factions of representatives reenacting the Huichang Persecution of Buddhism court debates circa 841. I was the leader of the Confucian faction - wise, arrogant, and traditional. We argued for the restriction and abolishment of Buddhism throughout the Tang Dynasty, as such foreign ideas were obviously dangerous to the peace and stability of Our Kingdom. Not to brag too much, but our faction won the game, and I achieved the title of “winning character.” Long live Niu Sengru.

Overall, it was a great final semester to close the book on my college journey.

Fall 2024 Notable Classes/Professors:

• Linear Algebra with Dr. Elizabeth Kelley
• Advanced Undergraduate Statistics with Catherine Bain
• Chinese Religions with Dr. Geoffrey Goble

Now what?

Well, dang. That’s my college experience.

I’m not certain what the future will hold. I’m currently in the final chapter of the grad school application process: Next week I start flying out to schools that have invited me to visit. I currently have next-to-no idea on the heuristic I should be using to select a program, so I’m hoping these trips will bring some much-needed clarity. (Plus, the schools all pay for my flights/lodging. Nice!)

Would I have done anything differently throughout college, in retrospect? Probably. I would have loved to study abroad for a semester—the price tag always kept me away. I think it would have been worth it, though. Other than that, I’m honestly very happy with how it went. OU was a great school—I met some great people. I grew a lot, and I found a passion in quantitative psychology. Not sure you can ask for more than that.

Time to see what grad school is like!