I owe my professional future to the McNair program and its research advisors and I aim to make them proud by continuing my journey into graduate education and the professoriate.
Throughout the entire McNair summer program I was challenged to do things I had never done before. When applying, I was required to create a research proposal for the project I would conduct during the summer, including hypotheses, what data would be used, and how it would be analyzed. This was my introduction to research and it took much consultation and self-reflection to determine how to handle this first step in my journey. My McNair research project went through several stages, but I settled on topics that I was passionate about: community service and criminal justice. I conducted a quantitative analysis of secondary data to determine the associations between community service programs present in South Carolina counties and