This poster was created for a presentation done in fall 2022 for my Women’s Health Issues class. The assignment was to, with a partner, pick a topic related to women’s health and research and develop an informative presentation on the subject. My partner, Sarah Freiberger, and I chose the topic of maternity leave. This project allowed me to hone in my research skills in an oral presentation based manner. One struggle with this project was the amount of information present. While researching, I found a vast amount of information on maternity leave, more than would be able to be put into a research poster. I then had to cut out some information that, while I found it interesting, might have been too specific or dated for the poster. This presentation was also given at a research symposium, which had my partner and I speaking with guests on our poster, research methods, and maternity leave in general. This was the first time I had done a research symposium, and I found myself rehearsing questions that might be asked and their appropriate answers in the hopes of not sounding unknowledgable or unprofessional while presenting. The opportunity to present this information at the symposium, however, also aided in my comfort with presenting my research and synthesizing my thoughts on the fly.

This paper was created for HLTH 2400 in the spring of 2022. To date, this paper is one of the longest and most in depth papers I have created, and it is on the topic of drug use in the LGBT teenage population and how social determinants of health affect it. This paper, an in depth literature review, was worked on throughout the semester. I began my research by picking the topic, something that interests me and that I had heard about but never researched, and determining what social determinants I wanted to focus on. The length of the paper, 19 pages with sources, was intimidating, as was finding information on the niche subject area. However, the paper was also very enlightening. I was able to find out more about the topic, but also about research in general. Writing it helped me to learn how to narrow down my questions when researching, and how to look at multiple sources to help come to a single conclusion.