105 Reflection on 2023 SPUR Experience

Faculty Mentor: Rebecca Utz (Sociology, University of Utah)

This summer, I worked with Dr. Utz and other lab members Amber Thompson and Catharine Sparks on multiple projects based on the Time for Living and Caring (TLC) study, which is a 16-week intervention funded by the National Institutes of Aging aimed to improve respite time-use satisfaction. I assisted Dr. Utz and Amber in the creation of a poster for the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) 2023, which was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands in July. I also had the opportunity to attend the conference with them to present the poster. Furthermore, I assisted Dr. Utz and Cathi in the examination of various demographic variables of enrolled participants and the creation of a couple tables for another project regarding recruitment methods for the TLC study. Lastly, I worked with Dr. Utz and Amber on a project for SPUR regarding perceptions of family caregivers and their desires to institutionalize. I briefly reviewed the literature to write a small annotated bibliography and analyzed the data using STATA with multiple regressions. The results of that project were written for this paper and presented at the Summer 2023 Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS).

As a Health Science student at Rice University with an interest in pursuing medicine, this experience has demonstrated the real-life implications of topics I study in class. The social determinants of health affect the ability and quality of caregiving, while caregiving is also a social determinant of health. This experience has also allowed me to develop some of my weakest research skills. I have learned data analysis in Stata and improved my written and verbal communication of research to an expert and general audience. In addition to the research experiences, Dr. Utz connected me to a couple physicians, whom I had the opportunity to shadow. Overall, this summer experience has been extremely valuable and has allowed me to gain the experience and skills necessary for researchers and physicians.