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Tuesday, May 27th 2025
I have been taking much needed rest after ✨submitting my dissertation manuscript last Friday✨ Here's a tiktok documenting what went into the process!!
It's an odd feeling: I'm definitely relieved but also feeling like I'm forgetting something. I wake up every day and feel a pressure to DO MORE--maybe because I've been going so hard the last few months and now it feels strange to not be in fight or flight mode every second of the day.
I'm working on my slides now, which is fortunately something I enjoy. I am a bit worried that they'll be too busy (I have SO MUCH TO TELL PEOPLE when it comes to my methods section), but even if the rest of my audience is a bit lost, my committee will know where we're at since they read all 160 pages of the manuscript.
In addition to my slides, I also have to prep some other things: format review by the university (I ordered ONE hardcover bound copy of the dissertation but also had to pay $95 to get the dissertation to be open access, sigh--who would have thought it'd require money to share science), finish my slides, practice my defense, and then I have to start looking for apartments which stresses me out so much.
But it's okay, it's worth it. I can't wait to start my post doc :) I just wish I could skip all the angst and anxiety that comes in between with any transition :P
I've already cried a lot recently thinking about leaving Riverside (and CA in general),. I've been here since fall 2013, that's nearly 12 years! My whole adult life! It feels so scary to leave what I feel like is the only thing I know! And yes, in NJ, I'll be closer to my parents and closer to my bestie Laura (which is a MAJOR plus), but I'll feel farther from the summer and the sun, I won't have the orange blossoms in the Spring, I'll even miss driving on the 91. I know I'll find other great things in NJ and I'm sure I'll make lots of new friends, but this is the END OF AN ERA and I don't think I'll ever be ready for it.
But who knows--maybe in 2 - 3 years when my post doc ends, I'll be singing this song about leaving NJ lol. It's always been my plan/goal/dream to come back to CA for my more permanent job/life, but there's a part of me that knows it'll be tough to go back to being so far from my parents. IDK how other people do it! Filial piety is not for the weak.
Wednesday, May 14th 2025
Wooooo hooooooo. What a busy time! Since my last post, I went to the Society for Research in Child Development biennial conference in Minneapolis to present some data that has been languishing in the lab. It isn't my bread and butter work, but I did have fun grossing people out with my slugs :) (my poster was about children's understanding of and approach to stimuli that elicit disgust and fear). It was a great time catching up with lots of old friends, especially my girl Helen who I met when I still worked at the UCLA Baby Lab and am still friends with to this day--even though she's doing her post-doc in CANADA.
I will say, Minneapolis was...more like MID-eapolis :0 (so sorry to people who love this city)--the food options were very strange. The first few things to come up when you google "good food minneapolis" were all $50 - $100, which is not what I'm looking for. Then, all the more reasonably priced places were just...not that exciting! Helen and I ended ordering pizza the first night, getting Kura revolving sushi (which was GREAT, but we've had it before in LA) the second night, and the same vietnamese place the following two days :P At least my advisor, Liz, found a great vegan place for our lab dinner--and thank goodness because my body needed vegetabes. It was cool to be able to say that I've been to the mall of America--but maybe I had a different idea of what it would be. I had imagined something more old-fashioned, like vibes from the mall that was in Stranger Things! But it was just a regular mall writ large.
When I got back from the conference, it was immediately back to full dissertation mode. And I've just been GRINDING to finish the manuscript. To the point that I cannot work with ANY KIND OF NOISE--making my usual "office" (Lift Coffee Roasters) not as viable of an option as it used to be😭 It's also been getting so busy, which makes me happy for them, but also annoyed because anytime I get there after 9:30AM, my SPOT is taken!!
Anyway, the dissertation is definitely going. Nothing is WRONG, it's just a LOT. And my typical coping mechanism is to use humor, so maybe you'll enjoy some of these videos that have come out of this process :P
But in all honesty, I've been pleasantly surprised at how calm I've been through the process. Maybe it's because I don't have the luxury of time to be stressed out about it, or maybe it's bc I know with full conviction that I will be done on time and that after the manuscript is submitted to my committee, I will have a GREAT time making slides because I loooooove to make slides.
Friday, April 11th 2025
Wow it sure has been a while, I guess I didn't quite realize just how long it's been since I last posted until one of my lovely readers asked about it today!
Here's a lil dump to give you in:
We processed a TON of data (still are; that child PEP is really going to be the bane of our existence--who knew!)
I went to my last ever interview weekend for the psych dept at UCR (which was funny, because our lab wasn't even interviewing students--but I love hanging out with other students and faculty, and as you can see will miss these fun times so much!
I had my OWN interview at Rutgers - Newark with Vanessa LoBue (who I'm proud to say will be my new advisor starting August 1st when I begin my post-doc with her!!!)
I also went to the WAGS 3-minute thesis competition where I moved on to the final round but didn't manage to clinch a place! It's a good reminder that the success of a talk really depends on your audience. I gave the most laid back and polished version of my grad slam talk thus far, and it fared worse than the first time I did it! But it's not about winning the competition for me--as cheesy as it sounds, it's about winning hearts and minds. Not only were people kind enough to poke me and whisper, "you were my top choice!" but I had a number of audience members who were parents come up to me and share how helpful it was to hear this because they'd been worried about their kiddos talking to themselves!! As I'm finding through my dissertation interviews, even though there seems to be a general consensus that self-talk can be helpful, many parents still worry about the stigma or judgment that comes with using it. Getting the word out about how developmentally typical AND helpful it is might be a huge first step in helping scientists figure out the best way to harness it.
And then less than 24 hours after I flew back from Denver from the 3MT, I got on a plane to Portland for the Society for Affective Science annual conference. SAS was extra fun this year because I was staffing it as their social media assistant ✨ (did you even go to a conference if you don't snap a pic in the elevator/waiting room mirror?)
Not only did I hear some great talks, but I got to reconnect with old friends, make new friends, and catch up with my new advisors, but I also got to try something a little fun and new with the SAS social media! Normally, I've been doing a lot of "flyer" type "media design" posts advertising different events--but while at the conference, I did some more fun, short-form content videos related to emotions! You can take a look at https://www.instagram.com/affectscience/ to see them!
By the time SAS was over, it was our spring break--during which I took some much needed time for myself IN ADDITION to getting some work done ahead of week 1 so that I could enjoy some time with Laura!! My bestie was back in the Westie! She came all the way from Philly to soak up the sun and spend some time with me. She also was SO KIND AS TO HELP ME WITH MY DISSERTATION DATA PROCESSING👑
She said "I remember what a hard time it was writing my dissertaion last year, and you helped me out with it so much, I totally came here prepared to sit at Lift (our go-to coffee shop) all day and work.
Needless to say, we didn't JUST do that--we also went to the San Diego zoo (my first time!) and had a blast 🐻🦩🐒
And now I'm here! It's the end of week 2 and I've already done a poster at the university graduate symposium (where I won an honorable mention for best poster!), helped FIVE RAs submit abstracts to the RPSYC undergraduate research conference, coached this year's grad slam contestants (who did an AMAZING JOB TONIGHT!!!), and submitted the first major draft of my results section to my advisor.
Guess it just shows just how fast time can fly and also, that being a grad student is about so much more than doing the research (something I echoed in my last post, too!).
I'm still the throes of data analysis (just drowning in R code🫠), but things are coming together! I'm so excited to present some qualitative data along with the quantitative data that I collected. I'm hoping it'll add some extra zest or joie de vive to the manuscript.
It's so crazy because in just a few months, my time here at UCR will be done :'( And even though I'm also so excited for the next chapter, it does feel bittersweet to be leaving right when I feel like I found my sweet spot.
In the meantime, EVERYONE IS CORDIALLY INVITED TO MY DISSERTATION DEFENSE! I'll have more information about the room in week 3 (just waiting on the registrar to confirm they didn't book a class at that time), and once that's ready I'll start working on information about a zoom link. Hope to see you there!
Thursday, December 12th 2024
Wow, it sure has been a while. Once the quarter started--it felt like I barely had any time to breathe! As a grad student, we often wear many hats--this time around, I was:
doing dissertation data collection as the main experimenter for every 2-3 hour visit (with one of my research assistants)
managing/training said research assistants
serving as a teaching assistant for a developmental lab psychology course
working as a part-time consultant for UCR TADP (Teaching and development program)
serving as the SAS (Society for Affective Science) social media committee assistant
interviewing/hiring new research assistants for our lab's new graduate students
cultivating the ER Lab's social media presence
participating in a podcast as a guest
processing data
writing letters of rec for past RAs and students
and doing other general research-y lab things!
All while also being a regular human trying to sleep, socialize, watch some tv, and go to the gym! My brain felt like swiss cheese and things were falling through the cracks--something that is pretty rare for me. Luckily, I had my amazing team to help catch me when I was slipping--reminding me to grab my keys before I left the room, bringing me my lunch after I've left it in the microwave, carrying my coffee when I've forgotten to pick it up, updating calendar events that I've forgotten about, catching data processing errors before they become big issues, and more. It's like they can read my mind and anticipate my needs, and I will never be able to verbalize just how grateful and fortunate I feel to have found them.
In fact, without this specific team, I don't think any of this would be possible. Because tonight, we officially finished data collection🎉 Though our first visit was on July 5th, we lost some days to schedule with international conference trips, personal vacation time, me being out sick with COVID, and holidays. Thus, in the equivalent just about 110 days (AKA 16 weeks AKA 4 months), we managed to run 87 participants. We actually scheduled 96 total and had only 4 no-shows and 5 cancellations (the other 7 participated but were unable to provide complete data). This hit rate is significantly improved compared to our lab's last major data collection effort (where out of 97 participants scheduled, 54 actually participated and 43 either no-showed or canceled). There are a few strategies that I think helped me out:
My visit was a single event (instead of part of a multi-component commitment) and it was shorter (1.5 - 2 hours of a participant's time)
I very intentionally called families who had more recently joined/been added to our database (with the assumption that with enrollment fresh in their mind, they might be more willing to sign up for a specific study)
I made good use of the tech available--instead of calling on our landline, I primarily called using our lab's Google Voice account. This allowed me to make/take calls on my own device instead of being physically constrained. Luckily the recruitment script lives in my brain rent free and the availability calendar lives on my phone, so I was scheduling families while walking to campus, while waiting for my laundry to finish, and even when I stepping out of the middle of a HIIT workout class (my main priority in life these past few months was getting as many participants in as possible)
In addition to the Google Voice making it easier to take/make calls, it also allowed me to text parents! Some people don't like talking on the phone or ignore phone calls from strange numbers, so I found texting was a nice back up
I also called families the day before their visit to remind them/check in--and if they didn't answer, sent a text (because it's so much easier to send a quick "I'll be there!" than it is to dial a number and make a call to confirm)
I was also lucky--since parents were not also participants in my study (and since my visits were relatively short), I was able to schedule siblings back to back (which made scheduling go much quicker)
I also aimed to call between 5:00pm - 6:30pm on weekdays (that's when I had the most luck).
So - if you ever have a study where you're calling participants from an existing database, these are some of my main suggestions to make the scheduling process go as smoothly as possible (PS do NOT call Sunday evenings--some households hold that space for family time and get a bit frustrated when it's interrupted). In a weird way, I think it also helped that I was the main person making calls--though it would have been nice to have my RAs make calls too, they were too overloaded with helping me run visits. But, the flip side of that was--I was VERY on top of remembering who to call back/who I had called/who needed a follow up/when good times were to call.
Finally--we haven't just been running visits, we've also been simultaneously processing data. For each participant (N = 80), the following tasks need to be done:
Placing about 40 event-marking timestamps to use for editing physiological data
Cutting the participant's visit video (~1 - 1.5 hours in length) into task-specific clips (of which there are ~23)
Editing/cleaning the heart rate data
Writing the heart rate data
Verifying the transcriptions for 5 interviews/tasks
Transcribing & timing vocalizations in two 5-minute tasks
Scoring EF tasks
Coding self-talk & emotion regulation strategies
Scoring parents' survey questionnaires
Cleaning/writing impedance data
I'd estimate that we half nearly half of all this done--all the heart rate data has been cleaned & written and is ready for analysis, all the EF tasks are scored, a little over half of the transcriptions have been verified, and nearly all the videos are clipped. In the new year, we're going to tackle the impedance data cleaning with a vengeance (once I figure out exactly how to do it).
All that to say, I hope you can understand why I've been so absent from this blog! I'll do my best to keep things more up to date now that I'll have more bandwidth. I was lucky enough to get a dissertation year completion fellowship that covers my stipend for the winter & spring quarters. This means that I don't have to teach--which also means that I'll have tons more time for processing data, running analyses, and writing!
I'm going to go hARD with my winter break--and my go hard, I mean REST HARD. I don't want to keep burning the candle too long--lest I burn out. This way, in January I'll be ready to hit the ground running :)
Friday, September 27th 2024
It has been a WHIRLWIND few weeks!
The UCR Psych Department Welcome Back conference was on Tuesday
Fall quarter started yesterday
I presented my Grad Slam talk for the UC Board of Regents last Wednesday
SRCD abstract submissions were due yesterday (until the deadline was extended)
Submissions for campus Dissertation Completion Fellowship Awards are due today
Our lab's 2 new graduate students start this week!!!
Our lab's deadline for RA applications ended yesterday evening (so now we must review!)
My first major job application deadline approaches on Tuesday
My cat got 6 teeth extracted
And all the while--my RAs and I are still running visits! We've got data from 30 participants now--and aiming for 80 total by the end of the quarter!
I wish I was better about taking pictures to document these events (though I did snap a few while I was walking around my old UCLA stomping grounds after the Regents meeting)--but keep your eyes on on our lab instagram for other general research/dissertation/grad student/psych science content!
Tuesday, September 3rd 2024
Just sharing a little something my RA and I put together the other day~ This "sound" has been viral on Tiktok so we wanted to add our own little dev psych science spin on it 🔮🔬
2024-08-30-174427666.mp4Tuesday, August 27th 2024
This week will be my first full week back in about a month! I went to South Korea to visit my family for two weeks (which was amazing) but I must have caught COVID on my flight home because when I got back, I felt a little funky. After testing negative for two days, the third was the charm and it was official. This was my second time getting it and it was WAY worse than the first--it took me out for nearly a whole 10 days!
But I've been trying to appraise it as "the body keeps the score"--I've been go-go-going for so long, maybe this was my body's way of giving me a break full stop. And maybe my body was right to do that because while I was sick, I watched so much television and read so many books, I've run out! That makes me feel even more excited to get back to work.
This experience has reminded me of the importance of taking breaks and recharging. As a grad student, it's easy to get bogged down in worries about being productive, guilt over NOT being productive enough, and feeling like there's always something that you need to be doing. BUT! Those feelings are hard on the body and mind and are just not sustainable. I don't recommend waiting until your body is so done that it has to force you to stop like mine did, so I definitely recommend taking a few more short breaks in between ("everything in moderation").
Now that I'm back, I'm ready to hit the ground running. Keep an eye out on the lab instagram for more content! We're going to have new graduate students and research assistants joining us soon, so it'll be a full and fun house~
Here are some highlights from my trip!
Tuesday, July 23rd 2024
Whew - what a whirlwind! This morning was the first time waking up in my own bed after a week of traveling for the ISRE conference in Northern Ireland where I presented a talk titled: Emotion Regulation Strategies in Diverse Contexts: Insights from Mexican and Yucatec Maya Children. It was such a great experience to see all the other work going on in the field, and was also great to meet new people, see old friends, and walk around the beautiful city of Belfast.
We also got to see three great keynotes by Yuri Miyamoto, Phoebe Ellsworth, and Terry Maroney--all sparking questions and inspirations for my own work. The conference itself was designed to very eco-friendly and sustainable, too--the lunches and snacks were all vegetarian or vegan, the venue offered reusable cups for tea/water/coffee, and our conference swag bags are resusable/transformable bags that held some locally made chocolate, lovely tea, a notebook made from recycled materials, a pen, and a reusable drink tumbler! One of the most functional/usable sets of conference swag I'd ever received.
Queen's College (where the conference was held) is also right next to these beautiful botanical gardens where I got to see so many flowers and ride a ferris wheel.
My one lament is that I didn't get to visit Giant's Causeway--if you ever go, plan to have a whole day dedicated to that trip up from the city centre!
I also won 2nd place in the ISRE Emotion Express video competition--a new initiative at ISRE designed to provide a space for researchers to tell people about our research using language accessible to a general audience, or those who might not be familiar with emotion research and get them as excited about emotions as we are! You can check out my submission below--the other submissions (including first place winner, Roza Kamiloglu!!) are available for fiew on the isre.ig instagram page~
ShannonBrady-ISRE_EE_clip.mp4Thursday, July 11th 2024
I had so much fun presenting my Grad Slam talk at the Riverside Chamber of Commerce's Good Morning Riverside event today! Not only was it a great opportunity to share the benefits of self-talk with a broader audience, it was so cool to spend time in the historic Riverside Mission Inn--this was a part that I'd never been to before and it was beautiful. You'd think that I'd get more and more desensitized every time I speak in front of a crowd, but I still always get the jitters in the moments leading up to it. But then I get on stage and I have a great time (though my favorite part always comes AFTER the talk is over because that's when I get to chat with people more naturally).
On another note, we now have four participants for my dissertation (96 more to go!)--I'm going to Northern Ireland next week (for the ISRE conference!--you can take a look at my tiktok-esque reel highlighting my presentation on their instagram page), so things will be on pause for a bit, but we're working hard to get as many people before that time. In fact, we have three back to back visits tomorrow! That makes for long, but very productive and satisfying days~
Tuesday, July 9th 2024
Bet you never thought of it, but there's a lot that goes into developmental research behind the scenes--one part of that is going down to the parking lot to meet our participants (rain or shine--or 100° weather)! If we can give them a better experience by saving them some cognitive labor by picking them up instead of requiring them to call us when they arrive, it's worth it!!
2024-07-07-163340431.mp4Saturday, June 22nd 2024
Watched Inside Out 2 with the lab today! Great movie, dare I say I enjoyed it even more than the first one? What a dream it would be to be one of the science consultants for a major Pixar movie like this... It was super cool to see the addition of new emotions in Riley's brain (though can't help but wonder where they were when we got peeks into the adults' heads) and loved the other additions of "sense of self" and "beliefs." The one question I have left--and this is one of those "spoilers" without context--where's Bloofy?
Would be cool if the next one (will there a third?) tackles more of the emotion regulation piece. We saw a lil' taste of suppression here, but as she enters puberty, Riley is still all about that expression. Hope there's room for other emotions too! Pride? Shame? LOVE???
On an unrelated note, who would have expected the most difficult part of my dissertation would be finding...keys? With the help of my lab mates, I've been able to scrounge up about fourteen. But when you really think about it--I'll probably need a lot more than that to occupy a 9-year-old kid for a full 5 minutes as they try to unlock an impossible lock. I went to Home Depot to see if they could make some copies with errors in them, but that's...not really what you want when you're duplicating keys so the answer was no. I also called around to a couple of thrift shops and locksmiths but the answer was also...no. Fortunately, the very nice gen Z employees at Home Depot didn't even blink when I asked if they had any unclaimed or random throwaway keys that had been cut and laying around--so that got me three! Worst case scenario, I'll duplicate a bunch of other keys I find (I wouldn't have thought it would only be $5 a duplicate), but will also reach out to the department to see if anyone else has some lying around. Fingers crossed!
Friday, May 8th 2024
I had such a great time participating in this year's UC System-wide Grad Slam competition and am so fortunate to have placed 3rd across all the first-place winners from each of the 10 UC campuses! I always joke that I hope to be the Neil deGrasse Tyson of Psych Science--and this just helps get me one step further!
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