Senior Seminar Capstone

This past year has been such a whirlwind! I have accomplished so many things in my military career along with my civilian life, had great opportunities, and met amazing people. One of the opportunities I was afforded was the chance to work with a faculty member and grad student to work on a research project funded by a CURS grant. A CURS (center for undergrad research and scholarship) funding source allows students to work with Bowling Green faculty to foster the research culture to learn through the inquiry process in a professional manner at the national level.  Both myself and another undergrad dietetic peer of mine, Marissa jumped at the chance to take part.

Over the summer months we worked, assembling packets, picking up completed surveys, collecting data, inputting results, and analyzing our numbers. We completed our CURS requirements and were then able to use this research for our Senior Capstone for our senior seminar course this fall. We were very lucky to have compelte our research prior to the beginning of the semester entering this course. It gave us a head start which was ideal for my final semester at BGSU.I never thought I would ever have had the opportunity to conduct research at this professional and national level. It was such a great experience and was quite eye opening as to how these things are conducted through the IRB process, collecting survey responses, and in our findings. Food insecurity ravages all age groups and demographics, however the elderly populations suffers in silence. They are all too often forgotten. 

Our research revealed interesting results that we hypothesized would be so. Food security plays a vital role in the elderly population and is crucial in ensuring their health, mobility, and ability to ward off disease and infection. Proper nutrition can help with keeping this population in their homes for longer, enhance their quality of life, and support their activities of daily life. Overall, this research provided further support of why programs such as these are vital to the community and for those in need. However, we did have a heterodox conclusion in regard to the negative correlation found between fast food and food insecurity, which is thought provoking in itself.  Traditionally, compared to other studies, as food insecurity increases as does the intake of fast foods, however in our study, this was not so. Further research can be conducted as to why this occurred. Taken on the whole, this research project furthered my curiosity into this field and population. We only ran into some minor errors in a number system, which was correctly seamlessly before the surveys were distributed. 

This experience offered me a deeper insight to not only how research is conducted, but the intricate process leading up to planning of the research projects and it’s objectives. I had no inclination prior to this opportunity on how much planning and preparation goes into conducting research on this scale. We received a substantial number of responses, to our delight. One problem we ran into was incomplete surveys, which we mitigated in our programming while creating data sets on our conclusion statistics. Moreover, this experience was so valuable & outside of what I have experienced thus far at BGSU. I am so grateful for the opportunity to explore these methods and processes.