SARA CHARLTON
News Reporter
Illegal trading, technology spending and employment are just a few topics the Political Science students enrolled in PLS 591, Senior Research Seminar, will be presenting as part of their senior research projects.
The presentations will take place in the Skutt Student Center on Dec. 4 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and will feature these final projects as the central event.
At the beginning of the semester, students decided what questions they wanted to pursue and have been analyzing data, studying hypotheses and testing those hypotheses over this past semester. Some students have said they spent more than 200 hours on this research assignment.
Each senior will create a poster with his or her main ideas, data, analysis and hypothesis along with results for the presentation.
Arts & Sciences senior Houston Johansen has been diligent over the semester, spending hours in the data lab compiling his results.
“I think it is really interesting what I have found, and I am excited to see what my peers have studied as well,” Johansen said.
“With such variety in topics, it will be a unique experience for students to come and see.”
Arts & Sciences senior Mike Manning thought it would be interesting to determine how informal economies affect formal economies in Latin American countries.
After coming up with an idea, a student can either comprise a model of data or download a similar set online.
Then, the students used a program called Stata to test various numbers and scenarios that either reinforced or disproved their hypotheses. Over the semester, many different data sets were tested, and more and more information was collected.
This long and sometimes frustrating process helped students come to conclusions about certain societal questions.
Johansen said it is important to run these tests, as societies are constantly changing. Because of that, constant research is necessary.
Dr. Terry Clark, professor of political science and the seminar course, thinks this research project is really important for students at Creighton.
“Students get top jobs and into top programs in the country because of these research projects. Most undergraduates in the country can’t do these projects and will not do this kind of research before they graduate,” Clark said.
Some of the students believe the poster presentation will be an interesting way to see how the world is changing and to identify different situations and their effects on society.
It is also a way to showcase what they have concluded after the semester’s research and years of learning about the political science field.
“We are very, very proud of what our students can do,” Clark said. “Most of the students in the 591 class get great jobs because of these projects.”