MSU Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Discovery hosted the Undergraduate Research Symposium April 13-14.
Anastasia Elder, director of the URCD, said the annual event gave undergraduate students a chance to share and showcase their research.
“In research, a way to disseminate work through presentations and posters is typical of what scholars in academic fields do,” Elder said. 
The symposium began with posters in the fields of physical sciences, engineering, arts, humanities and social sciences. The first day concluded with oral presentations for arts and humanities projects.
The second day focused on poster presentations for biological sciences and engineering, as well as the three-minute research pitch competition.
According to Elder, the three-minute research pitch competition was based on a national graduate-level organizing competition called the three-minute thesis.
“That one encourages students to communicate about the technical aspects of their work, but to a late audience so that way, they’re going to be judged and evaluated based on how well they can communicate what is important and interesting,” Elder said.
As for the poster and oral presentations, Elder said these students also had the opportunity for their work to be judged and evaluated.
“So, they have faculty … and grad students come around to either provide comments on their project feedback, give helpful feedback or judge them for certain special area competition,” Elder said.
Mikayla Herndon and Addison All are both seniors majoring in psychology. The pair presented a poster on grit, a concept in academic workplaces which measures success and ability to persevere.
“We did the research together, and then basically came up with two ideas and each pursued one,” All said. “Mine was to see whether it is a better predictor of outcomes for suicide and personality.”
Herndon’s side of the project focused on the potential importance of grit as a predictor.
“So, we took outcomes like depression, anxiety and stress, and we looked at the five-factor model, which is like the general personality model, and we saw the associative strength between that model and those outcomes, and then we ended up adding grit to it,” Herndon said.
Herndon and All agreed they decided to enter the symposium because they wanted to work on a project together.
“Yeah, I think it’s like really just trying to use whatever opportunities that we can get, and it’s like having the data just makes it so much easier. If like you’re involved in labs like that, where you can have the data available to you, it’s just like, you might as well do the project,” Herndon said.
In the future, Elder said she hoped the event would continue to be integrated further across campus.
“If you were ever like ‘I want to know a little bit about what’s going on in science kinds of things’, there’s 110 projects that are represent undergraduates working on projects that are mentored by faculty,” Elder said.
For more information on the research symposium, visit urcd.msstate.edu.