Project Update + Smart Goals:

As of now, I have a literature review covering topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health in adolescence, and resilience in adolescence. I also have the majority of a project proposal completed. My September SMART goals are to finish writing my resilience and mental heath survey, and to begin setting up my survey on a poll system. Completing this goal will allow me to obtain data for my project, and I hope to finish this goal in 3-4 weeks. My main obstacle is time. In order to complete this goal, I will organize my weekly MARC work, make sure to start my work in class, and work for short periods of time everyday. I will also make weekly or bi-weekly meetings with Amy and my MARC mentors.

Project Update (9/14/21):

In the past two weeks, I have been working on completing my September smart goals by reconnecting with my mentors, finding and reading experiments on resilience, and drafting potential survey questions. Right now, continuing my drafts of the questions are my priority and a plan to have a full set of questions in a week. After that, I can select a poll system to use, and then meet with my mentors to get feedback. In order to accomplish this, I will continue organizing my weekly MARC work, make sure to start tasks during class, and stay in close contact with my mentors.

Project Update (11/3/21):

In the past week, I held a meeting with my MARC mentors, Dr. Dan Ragland and Dr. Faye Dixon. During our meeting, I was able to finish the demographics survey questions and then find two standardized survey questionnaires (one on anxiety and one on depression) that I will use to get normative data on the adolescent's mental health/mental state. We also looked into resilience based survey questions, finding a a number of articles and a database that will help me set up the final, resilience based survey questions. Moving forward, I will continue reviewing resilience based literature and begin pulling out the pieces that will work most effectively with my overall survey questionnaire.

Project Update (2/18/22)

This week, I sent out my survey questionnaire to Marin Academy's student body. So far, I have received about 100 responses and I hope to see more over the next few days. I am also planning to reach out to other high schools in the Bay Area such as Lick Wilmerding HS, Bay HS, Urban HS, University HS, and Branson HS. My survey's response rate has been about 70% and almost 25% of the Marin Academy student community has taken the questionnaire. I'm looking forward to analyzing my data!

Final Project Update (5/31/22)

A few nights ago, I gave my final MARC presentation over zoom and I'm working on finishing the final academic paper. I thought the presentation went smoothly and I loved listening to all the other MARCer's presentations. I am so proud of my classmates and I feel lucky to have had this experience over the last two years. Although I did not find a correlation between anxiety and resilience nor depression and resilience, I believe that my data on its own is still valuable to the MA community. My plan is to report the depression and anxiety data to the MA administrators in hopes that the community will make a greater effort to lower these rates.