Hello, my name is Ekaterina Yukhnovich and I’m a Level 2
Undergraduate here at the University of Sheffield.
Let me first explain what SURE is, as it will be mentioned a
lot throughout this blog. It is a scheme at the University of Sheffield (UK),
called the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience. Undergraduate students
in the penultimate year of education have a chance to carry out a paid project
for 6 weeks of summer. They need to find a faculty member that they would like
to do the project with and fill out an application form. The process is rather
competitive, with about a third of applicants actually succeeding this year. I
was fortunate enough to become one of these students.
In my case, I emailed Megan Freeth, who suggested that I
meet with Caroline Treweek. This lady is a Ph.D. student that created the
entire experiment for her thesis and wanted some help collecting data.
Initially, I was nervous about time management,
communicating with both supervisors and participants, and the uncertainty over
what was to come. However, as the first week passed, these worries have mostly
subsided. For one, I am actually finding it easier to keep to personally set
goals (for example, with reading some previous research and keeping on top of
emails from participants) than I do when studying. This may be because the work
day has time limits, whereas studying can be done at any point in time. Of
course, I have only just started and it is probably not representative of the rest
of the experience, or any future research I will (hopefully) be doing.
There
was a helpful training session on the second day of SURE. We discussed
techniques to improve procrastination and other students' problematic
tendencies, as well as receiving some nice English food which I mistook for
sushi. Although I was already excited, this session made me eager to begin the
process. In this session, there were students from multiple disciplines, which
made the conversations more fascinating. There was a man studying the make-up
of the universe, a woman looking at the change in representations of Eve in
pre- and post-feminist literature, and many more that I cannot recall. The girl
who was sitting next to me was from the Geography department and we even agreed
to take a trip to Peak District at some point. I cannot wait to find out what
the others have found in the dissemination evening in February.
To finish this post, I have to say that the first week has
gone excellently, and I am already learning skills that will be important
through this project and later life.
