CRACKING THE RESEARCH CODE: A STUDENT'S GUIDE TO RESEARCH AT NMU
NMU senior Carly Schrank shares her experience completing research as an undergraduate student:
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As an underclassman, I had always thought that completing research was perceived as one of the most overwhelming tasks of being a college student. For years, we have always been taught to write papers analyzing studies done by other students, and I was a bit nervous to start a 400-level class titled “Business Research” — where the entire class is centered around a substantial research project.
When walking into Dr. Heejung Park’s class on the first day of the winter 2024 semester, I was relieved to be greeted by many familiar faces. After choosing a seat at a table with my long-time friends — Alexandra Hagan, Brandon Grasse, Elizabeth Preston, and Cassidy Chapman — I could not have been more thrilled to find out that they would be my group members for our semester-long project.
Dr. Park then explained that we would need to select a topic related to how finances impact college students, as the topic was relevant to our community, and also a massive group of the population across the nation. After much deliberation, our group decided to analyze the relationship between college majors and students’ financial well-being.
As students in the College of Business, we are more exposed to financial topics than other degree programs. Courses in the College of Business cover areas in economics, accounting, and personal finance, all of which aid in paving a path for an individual’s successful financial future. With that being said, our group hypothesized that students pursuing a business-related field would have higher financial well-being compared to other majors. We also hypothesized that business majors would be more likely to have personal investment accounts.
To continue our research process, we then developed a survey consisting of primarily agree/disagree questions that asked students various questions regarding their comfort levels with individual finances and familiarity with personal investment accounts. We then spent around a month posting the survey on social media, going up to random students in the hallway, and asking others to share our survey in hopes of getting a wide variety in our sample size.
After analyzing the results, we discovered that our research was a success! Our hypothesis that business-related majors tended to have higher financial well-being scores than other majors was supported, and our data also showed that business majors are more likely to have personal investment accounts than other majors.
While conducting research seemed overwhelming at first, Dr. Park made the process easier by breaking down our project into weekly sections that built on top of each other. I learned a lot about how important teamwork is to the success of a research project, as well as how to divide and conquer a large assignment by creating individualized roles within our project. A combination of constant communication between our group members and regular meetings ensured that we were all on the same page throughout the semester. I was very fortunate to have such an amazing and hardworking team!
As a senior majoring in public relations and minoring in economics, I’m grateful that I completed research as an undergraduate student before pursuing graduate school and my future career. I’m confident that this experience will help me feel more comfortable completing a larger-scale research project in the future, as the field I’m going into relies heavily on gathering and analyzing consumer data.
Since completing our Business Research class, NMU has given our group the amazing opportunity to submit our paper to the Society for Marketing Advances Conference, which is being held in Tampa, Florida this November. As our paper is being reviewed, we hope our research will be selected to be presented at this upcoming conference to share our findings with other students and marketing professionals this fall!
For more info on conducting research at NMU, visit the NMU Office of Sponsored Programs
Article updated on 8/29/2024 - The group has been accepted into the SMA conference and will be representing NMU in Tampa, FL