Public Policy Research Student

Anne Porter is a 12th grade student from Avenues: The World School, New York. She is interested to work on a Public Policy research.

Anne’s academic interests are interdisciplinary and experiential as she hopes to continue immersion in different cultures, learning about various economic and government systems. Prior to this mentorship program, she has created a start-up with her classmate on mental health awareness and personal development.

Scope of the program

Overall structure

In an 8-week one-on-one tutoring course, topic of interest. Anne’s research question was: why did mask compliance differ in the United States and Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic? The mentor and Anne met weekly and guided her to write her research paper step-by-step:
Idea generation, hypothesis formulation, gathering research articles and summarizing them, writing an abstract and outline, writing a first draft with 3 major points, and revising the paper until Anne had an excellent final draft.

Learning objectives

Anne wrote a research paper using scientific research articles published in the field of psychology in the format for publication recommended by the American Psychological Association. She learned to:

Formulate a testable hypothesis
Select relevant research articles from a wide range of academic journals available
Summarize the findings from articles in Anne’s own words
Write an abstract in APA format
Anne to organize her ideas in an outline and integrate the research findings into a cohesive paper
Draw accurate conclusions based on the research findings

What challenges did she face?

It was challenging for Anne to understand the relevant findings and filter out all the irrelevant details from her research articles.
Anne had several extracurricular outside of this mentorship program, and had to juggle her time well to fit everything in.

How did our program help her?

Anne learnt to write to make her case using facts and anecdotes. From reading research articles, she also learnt to discern factual conclusions from opinions.
Through this mentorship, she improved a lot in her writings. She worked hard to earn her credibility and the mentor was more than happy to write letters of recommendation for her.

Matched professor in Public Policy:

An associate professor of psychology at Barnard College of Columbia University. She developed the mirror-based meditation called “a revelation” in the New York Times. Her research on motivation, perception, and cognition has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Recommendation letter

Based on your knowledge of this student, would you recommend this student to selective universities? Why or why not?

“Yes, I believe Anne has the personal and intellectual capacities to be very successful in a wide range of endeavors – this would definitely include distinctive academic success at a top university or college.”
Mentor from Barnard College of Columbia University