Krishna

 
Please provide a brief summary of your research.
I worked on a couple of projects. In one of those, I tried to gauge the role of individual differences in compulsive use of social media platforms such as YouTube. Another was an examination of ephemeral sharing on Facebook and Instagram.

What made you initially interested in researching your project in particular?
When I was working with Dr. Justin Martin on one of his projects on the intrinsic need for orientation, I stumbled upon articles that looked at associations between individuals’ behaviors and their personality traits. Then I read more on such individual differences and started to think about how such differences along with use motivations might affect people’s social media use. On Quora and on Reddit, I had also seen people ask questions about how to fix their “social media addiction,” and that also got me quite interested in the topic that I chose.

What made you interested in pursuing (interdisciplinary) research more broadly?
During my sophomore year, I took a statistics course with Dr. Justin Martin. That course was my first glimpse into a scientific examination of questions in mass media, social media, and psychology. Then when I started reading on media psychology, I started coming up with my own questions. Some of those had already been answered by others, and I just had to look them up on an academic database such as Google Scholar. Some were not. Among those that were not, a few could be answered with the methods I learned in that statistics class. Outside of the class, I have worked as a research assistant for Prof. Justin Martin as well as Prof. George Anghelcev. Both are amazing scholars, and have always encouraged me to follow my curiosity in research. I am very grateful to Dr. Martin and Dr. Anghelcev, as well as Dr. Ilhem Allagui who helped me with one of my projects.

Describe your experiences with research thus far. Was it tricky? What skills do you think you’ve gained?
Before I received this grant, I had mostly only worked for professors (Dr. Justin Martin, Dr. Torsten Menge, and Dr. George Anghelcev) as a research assistant. When you work on projects supervised by your professors, it is methodical in some ways, and they assign you particular things to learn and tasks to complete. I have learnt a lot this way, and I am quite grateful for the experience. But at the same time, I also wanted to grow and do some independent work where I could be my own supervisor. SURG allowed me to do that. I worked on a project with two other student co-authors and after completion, we applied for presentation at the International Communication Association(ICA)’s 72nd conference. Our full paper got accepted and we will be presenting at ICA’s conference in May this year.
During this time, I think I have mostly learned to do independent work, and over the last three years, I have learned that as much as it is about thinking through things, research is mostly reading and writing and re-writing. Being orderly and industrious really helps. In terms of skills, I have learned to do many different types of quantitative analyses necessary for research work in the social sciences.

Any tips or advice you have for students similar to you that are interested in pursuing undergraduate research?
Everybody finds it overwhelming at the beginning. So if you are having those intimidating feelings, please understand that it’s completely natural. Also, this might not be exclusively a research-related advice, but if you struggle with procrastination at times, getting a study partner or a work partner might help. I had a friend with whom I had regular Zoom study sessions, in which both of us would be working on our own research projects. That immensely helped me with my productivity throughout the summer.

Do you have a podcast/documentary/piece of shareable media related to your research?
I am going to present a paper with a couple of other student co-authors at the ICA meeting this year. Here is a link to my paper. If you want to read but the full text is not available for you, just press the button “Request the full text from the author” and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

If you had unlimited time, money, resources, support, etc. what is something you would research?
Two things come to mind: 1. Reducing the spread of fake news, and 2. different forms of problematic use of social media.

Favorite breakfast food?
Milk and cereal.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned/read about/listened to this week?
People become less aggressive if you remove their amygdala. Don’t try it; there are other consequences too.