COVID put a damper on the second half of junior year, just as it affected us all. I was grateful for the ability to move back in with my parents, and for my previous summer’s experience with online classes. Life still wasn’t easy—I still miss going to church, playing tennis, and getting lunch with friends—but these made the transition into quarantine that much easier. I am also thankful that my internship was converted to a remote experience; I was able to work during the day and spend time with my family and boyfriend in the evening and on the weekends.
My People Analytics Internship at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago was an absolutely amazing experience that helped me grow in so many ways. I was blessed with having one of the best teams I have ever been a part of. My manager and two teammates encouraged me every day to ask questions, push myself in new challenges, reach out to new people, and develop myself professionally and personally. They were truly invested in my learning and development, and for that I am grateful. They taught me hard skills, like how to code in SQL and how to use the data visualization software such as Tableau (check out my first public visualization here), but more than that, they taught me the importance of work-life balance and collaboration, especially in this time of quarantine. They also had me take a Kolbe Assessment, a strengths finding psychological test that has been scientifically proven to measure an individual’s problem solving style. I am 7-5-6-3, which means that first and foremost, I am a fact finder. That is, I need all the facts before I come to a conclusion. I see this in the way I approach social justice issues and politics more broadly. Secondly, I am a modifier, which means that I am very adaptable; as plans change and obstacles arise, I modify plans to best fit the situation. Thirdly, I like to maintain the way things are organized. Finally, I am an envisioner, which means I like to conceptualize things abstractly with presentations and pictures (that also means I should not be trusted to operate or fix hardware). I am grateful to the Fed for enabling me to apply my research with the Brauer Lab to develop a real Bank solution. For context, the research I do for the Lab is about promoting and encouraging inclusive behaviors using social norms. This means that instead of a traditional diversity training, which we see is often unproductive or counterproductive (Paluck 2009), our lab predicts that making inclusive behaviors “popular” or normative will best decrease prejudiced behavior and improve the climate on campus, in a company, or within a community. I worked with two other amazing interns, Amr H and Gabe M, to develop and pitch a social norms intervention at the Fed. Although we did not win (our presentation was too academic and not entertaining enough according to subsequent feedback), we were heard by quite a few people, including the Diversity and Inclusion team. As Gabe stated at the end of the project, “I just hope [the Fed] can use our idea for good.” One of the biggest growths I developed from that internship was my love for data analytics. For the first time, I truly lost myself in creating dashboards in Tableau Desktop and restructuring data in Tableau Prep. It was the perfect way to combine my graphic design skills with my inductive ability to find patterns and trends in a large data set. With this new data direction, I networked hard this summer, both at the Chicago Fed and beyond. I have been more and more involved with Tableau and data science communities, particularly in Madison. I am leveraging connections—new and old—to learn more about data analytics and the opportunities that are out there. Two aspects of job hunting I am still working on are location and industry. In the former case, I have to ask myself the same question I was asked when choosing a university: where can I see myself living for the next 5 years? The answer to this seems simple. I love Madison, and could very well live there for at least another 5 years. However, Madison is my comfort zone; I know nothing about living elsewhere, particularly in a big city like Chicago or Vancouver, so if an opportunity comes up, would I turn it down because of its location? I hope to keep an open mind as I navigate the full-time world. The second question I need to ask myself when job hunting this year is what data do I like to study? I loved working with people data at the Fed. How employees are feeling should matter to any company, and the better an organization can quantify that experience, the more impactful its data analysis will be. However, I don’t want to pigeon hole myself into HR just yet. I would love to explore the other ways I can use data to understand the motivations and consequences of human behavior. I have some ideas in mind: insurance, financial services, and economic consulting firms would be on the top of that list. I am looking to my UpperHouse Fellowship this year to provide some answers to these questions. The fellowship sounds a lot like the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry, which I continue to work for as digital coordinator, but it is interdenominational instead of interfaith. Its goal is to bring Christians together to think about their vocational careers in light of their faith. I hope this adventure is fruitful and enlightening. I am excited to use this strange and virtual senior year to explore myself and my career opportunities, and I cannot wait to update you on my progress!
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This year has been a time of growth for me, particularly in how I think about religion, interfaith, and myself. Interfaith has been a very personal discussion for me this year, and I was able to learn so much about the Catholic tradition in the conversations I have had. I learned a lot about apologetics and how to use it, but it has also made me realize how much more I have to learn. Through the support of dear friends and colleagues, I was able to finish off the year tired but strong. It has made me really value the friendships I have built over the last two years, and I hope to continue to build these relationships over the next half of my college career.
Being Public Policy Intern for the Wisconsin Council of Churches has taught me how interfaith can be applied to social justice issues, like Child Poverty. For the spring semester, it was my job to develop a campaign to reduce Child Poverty in the state of Wisconsin by half in the next ten years. I researched extensively into Christian Poverty Ethics, including works by Dorothy Day and Reinhold Niebuhr. Although I am no longer an Interfaith Fellow at the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry, I have become part of their staff as Digital Coordinator and Consultant. I will be the one updating the website over the year, and I will be the one people ask for advice. I will not be expected to write or attend meetings, and I will not have to conduct any administrative work. I am excited to use my leadership skills in this position. This summer, I will be taking Interfaith Leadership in Practice. It is a way for me to evaluate what I have learned from CRGC and get credit towards one of my majors. On the Economics side, I am excited to be Vice President of Women in Economics. I hope I can serve the club and help foster the community I know it can be. Our high school outreach program is also just launching, as we have our very first high school visit this Friday. It will be an intense semester with some very interesting courses, but I cannot wait to use this summer to reflect on how fruitful this last year has been. May 11, 2018
As a freshman at UW Madison, I have expanded my research in religion and economics. I have declared my majors in Economics and Psychology, with a certificate in Religious Studies. I was able to meet with Dr. Chaeyoon Lim, a sociologist who researches on the relationship between subjective well-being and religiosity. I plan to redo my analysis using the General Social Survey data I now have access to via the university. Dr. Markus Brauer’s psychology lab will allow me to develop this type of research next semester as an RA. Dr. Ulrich Rosenhagen has enabled me to more deeply understand the importance of religion in a contemporary sociocultural context. The Necessity of Now Seminar he led with Greg Steinberger at the Hillel Center allowed me to not only discuss religion’s impact on race politics with other students from different religious backgrounds, but experience the National Holocaust and African American History Museum in Washington DC. Next semester, I am excited to be an Interfaith Fellow for the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry and continue the interfaith discussion. Besides interfaith discussion, I have also been increasingly involved in Women in Economics (WE). I was one of two UWM representatives to attend the Third Annual National Undergraduate Women in Economics Conference at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign in April 2018. The women at the conference — including the Chicago Federal Reserve senior researcher Lisa Barrow and WE's co-founder Tatyana Avilova — inspired me to run for a position on of UW WE’s Executive Board. As the new Professional Outreach Chair, I am in charge of bringing female professionals with Economics backgrounds to speak with WE about their own experiences as a woman in economics. I also plan to use my new position to pilot a high school outreach program that would expose more high school students to Economics as a field. I have had a great freshman year, and I am excited to see how these opportunities unfold! The survey is officially closed! I have a whopping 330 responses. My goal was 200. I am blown away.
This week I completed my first semester research paper. It made me question why I was conducting this study, and why I want to continue this research. Ultimately, it is belief. The ultimate question I am trying to answer: what does it mean to believe?
The study I plan to conduct is an attempt to see the correlation between behavior and spirituality. Belief in an abstract being can impact how we spend our time, productively or unproductively. Something I found while conducting my research was the data from GSS, the General Social Survey, that could potentially provide the data I need. However, the means of attaining such data (let alone read it) are high, in that it costs a hefty $1170 for a software that can read the data. Next semsester, I am excited to get started on my survey, learning how to quantify my data, and distributing the survey throughout the community. Although the sources of errors are great, I believe this project can give me good experience and survey collection and serve as a beginning into my research on religion and economics. This week, I continued my research into religion. I have narrowed down which religions I will focus on in my survey to those readily available in the Rockford area. As a high school student, I am fairly limited in what I can realistically research over the next few weeks, but I hope that I can effectively study within my limits. It will be difficult, and I have yet to produce the first semester research paper, but it should be a fun process and exposure to research.
This being said, I will be looking at the following religions:
As for time allocation, I have three categories. All activities MUST add to 24 hours. The survey is still only a draft, but I should like to distribute them to the community by the end of January. Hope everyone had a wonderful break! I have been researching more about religion in surveys. I found a wonderful article that suggests new ways to measure religiosity without the Christian bias that I may have. One major obstacle I am facing is finding the differences between Christian and non-Christian religions. Because I live in a culture of Western, Christian beliefs, I cannot ask unbiased questions that cover the majority of religions. As a result, I have decided only to cover the major religious groups: Christian, Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindi, Earth-Centered Believers (Pagans), Agnostic, and Atheist. This will be a challenge because of the bias, but due to my limited sample size in the US, it should not be as large a factor as it would be if I were studying religion in an Eastern country.
I look forward to planning my project and combining it into a research project in the coming weeks. It will be a lot of work, but it should turn out wonderfully. Time is flying fast as Thanksgiving approaches. I have been puttering along with my research. I have found great preliminary data as to the demographics and religious distributions in Rockford, since that will be the population I will be studying. I have also been reading up on different religions and different survey questions, both of which provide essential insight when conducting this survey. Nest week, I need to research capital and consumable time and determine how best to retrieve this data from people. I also have to decide which religions I will be studying, and whether or not I want to do a stratified random sample or a convenience sample survey. If you or your friends would like to take part in this survey, please let me know!
This week was more reading into prior research that dealt with the relationships between religion and time allocation. The Finke article discussed how clergy spent their time, comparing how it changed over a generation. The 1975 article provided a great background as to how to create a survey. The Gruber article explores how the secularization of the world affects religious attendance. All these, and other articles, are helping to establish a foundation on which I can begin my research. I have a long way to go, and I know that conducting my survey will be difficult. Right now, I have to stay focused on the research at hand.
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Emma Laiis a college senior majoring in Economics (Math Emphasis), Psychology, and Religious Studies. Archives
September 2020
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