The many places research can take you

Last weekend I was able to travel to Boston with eight other Mercyhurst students to present research at the James C. McCroskey and Virginia P. Richmond Undergraduate Scholars Conference. My research group, which consists of Alicia Cagle, Lindsay Cox and me, traveled to Washington D.C. last year to present research at this conference.  I talked about my experience there in this previous blog post.

This year, Alicia, Lindsay and I presented our paper titled "Framing of Muslims and America: A content analysis of opinion and news articles within international media outlets." Our paper looked at how Muslims and America are framed in relation to each other in both opinion and news articles from CNN, Fox News, NPR, The New York Times, BBC and Al Jazeera.

Alicia, Lindsay and I presented our
research during a poster session.

I was really excited to go back to this conference because last year's conference is the reason I started considering graduate schools. Different graduate schools with communication master's programs attend this conference to recruit students. Even though I wasn't interested in any of the schools that were at the conference, it's cool to hear about the different programs and opportunities. Just learning about these programs last year at the conference sparked my interest in grad school.

Another reason I was so excited to attend this conference was because I greatly enjoyed conducting this research, and I wanted to share our results with communication students and faculty. 

The three of us explored Boston when
we weren't presenting research.

 Sometimes you might not be excited about a topic when you start researching it, but if you work hard enough, you will become immersed in what you are studying. I wasn't extremely eager to begin studying the framing of Muslims in news sources when I began researching this topic in the fall of 2010. Now I just presented research on this same topic in the spring of 2012.

It sounds like such a long time to be researching the same topic, but my partners and I have been able to accomplish so much with our study. We were chosen as the top four paper at last year's Undergraduate Scholars Conference, we placed in the top five at the University of Buffalo's Research Symposium, we have been published in a communication journal and now we have presented at this year's Undergraduate Scholars Conference.

I'm not sure if I am done researching the framing of Muslims in news sources, but I'm very happy with the opportunities my research has provided me. I am looking forward to having opportunities to conduct research with faculty members at Ohio State next year, and I'm excited to see where this research will lead me.