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Verrazano Student Wins Award at Statewide CSTEP Conference

Posted on The Verrazano Voyager is a Blog June 5, 2012

Angelica Grant, Psychology major in the Verrazano Class of 2013, presented her research at the CSTEP Conference in Lake George, NY and won first place for her presentation. Congratulations, Angelica!

Please read below for more about Angelica's perspective on her research and her experience participating in the conference.

This past April, I had the chance to attend the 20th Annual Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP) Statewide Student Conference, which took place in Lake George, New York and was designed for students in the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines from colleges across New York state to gather together and present their research through poster and oral presentations.

The poster I presented, entitled, “Children’s Socio-Cognitive Understanding of Jealousy: The Effects of Age, Gender, and Perspective Taking Ability during Middle Childhood”, took 5 months to complete. I had been conducting the research for the poster with Nicole Kwoka under the supervision of Naomi J. Aldrich and Dr. Patricia J. Brooks.

For our research, we had a sample of 30 children (15 boys, 15 girls) between the ages of 5 and 11 give personal narratives about times where they felt jealous and tested them on four different tasks, including tests of emotional comprehension, language development, perspective taking ability and intellectual ability. We examined their narratives for jealousy labels (emotions) and explanation (emotions followed by an explanation) and found that as age increased, children’s emotional understanding, language ability and perspective taking ability increased and girls used more emotion words and talked more about jealousy in their stories than boys did.

I found out about CSTEP through Dr. Patricia Brooks at the beginning of the Spring 2012 semester. She informed me that this program focuses on supporting underrepresented students who are pursuing careers in the STEM disciplines and provides them with opportunities to present their research at conferences, which made me interested in applying as psychology was included under the STEM umbrella.

The CSTEP Conference was an amazing experience which allowed me to present my research to other college students and members of the academic world. I enjoyed being around so many like-minded students and faculty who were focused on pursuing their academic goals and becoming professionals in their chosen field. The conference offered workshops and motivational speeches as well, which gave me pointers on how to study effectively, cope with stress, and connect with students from different schools through networking. At the end of second day of the conference, I was extremely happy to have received 1st place in the Humanities and Social Sciences division for presenting my poster. The CSTEP Conference as a whole changed my outlook on life and reaffirmed my decision to continue on in the field of child development/educational psychology as a graduate student. I will definitely be signing up for next year’s conference!

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