The following blog post was written by fellow UHPer and Spring 2023 SURE Award recipient, Caleb Auerbach (Political Communication Major, ’23). Read on about how Caleb plans to utilize the SURE Award funding to further expand upon his research experience!
In fulfillment of my UHP thesis requirement, my research project explores how religiously affiliated student organizations at George Washington and American universities were impacted by COVID. More specifically, through the lens of their online communications materials via Instagram posts, I evaluate how their communications adapted to meet the challenges of the pandemic, and how they use what they learned from COVID in their current communications materials. As a direct result of my SURE funding, I was enabled to incorporate AU student groups into my study, strengthening any generalizability in my findings so that they are not solely in the context of student groups at GWU. In other words, the SURE awards enabled me to expand the scope of my study, which worked to increase the generalizability, and thus the relevancy of my study. I plan on using my SURE funding to help facilitate/incentive the interview process of my study, in addition to using it to recruit additional coders to ensure intercoder reliability for the data collected in my coding scheme. Without the funding, my study would not have been able to take the steps that truly make it significant. I just finished my data collection, which is where the generous SURE funding available to UHP students really proved itself to be an invaluable resource. No matter how strong of a study one has developed, additional funding will always serve as a doorway to greater avenues of success as it expands the definitions of what is possible for you to do. I would like to thank my entire Political Communication/UHP support staff and friends for shining the light and showing me the way to go. Your help and support mean more than you know.
Interested in applying for your own SURE Award funding? Find out more about the application process here!
