During my sophomore year as an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina, I was accepted into the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. I do not exaggerate when I say that this program changed the entire course of my life: helping me to fully understand my interests, altering my professional goals, and providing me with a viable path for my passions. As a first generation student, I had very little knowledge about how to navigate the sphere of undergraduate education and in the same vein, I knew next to nothing about graduate school. Before McNair I was never aware of what graduate school could offer me and the program, and the people it connected me with, became my greatest source of support as I made the journey into pursuing my doctorate.
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I owe my professional future to the McNair program and its research advisors and I aim to make them proud by continuing my journey into graduate education and the professoriate.
Throughout the entire McNair summer program I was challenged to do things I had never done before. When applying, I was required to create a research proposal for the project I would conduct during the summer, including hypotheses, what data would be used, and how it would be analyzed. This was my introduction to research and it took much consultation and self-reflection to determine how to handle this first step in my journey. My McNair research project went through several stages, but I settled on topics that I was passionate about: community service and criminal justice. I conducted a quantitative analysis of secondary data to determine the associations between community service programs present in South Carolina counties and
I owe my professional future to the McNair program and its research advisors and I aim to make them proud by continuing my journey into graduate education and the professoriate.
Throughout the entire McNair summer program I was challenged to do things I had never done before. When applying, I was required to create a research proposal for the project I would conduct during the summer, including hypotheses, what data would be used, and how it would be analyzed. This was my introduction to research and it took much consultation and self-reflection to determine how to handle this first step in my journey. My McNair research project went through several stages, but I settled on topics that I was passionate about: community service and criminal justice. I conducted a quantitative analysis of secondary data to determine the associations between community service programs present in South Carolina counties and