Annual Symposium Highlights Summer Undergraduate Research Program
The engineering plaza and its buildings were full of posters recently, as students presented their research findings during the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) Symposium.
SURP allows students to work with faculty over the summer on research in a Learn by Doing environment. With 37 students and 20 faculty members participating in research for the college, this is the fourth year Orfalea was involved with SURP.
The Office of Student Research boothed at the event, informing attendees about research opportunities at Cal Poly and directing them to where different colleges were presenting.
Business senior Kathryn Conrad worked on a project about the variables that affect sports ticket prices with economics junior Jordi Martinez and Joseph Kuehn, an associate professor of economics. Conrad said that the research was good practice with programming language R and how to use concepts learned in class to apply to real life studies.
“It was really interesting to learn about what researchers actually do,” Conrad said. “I think I didn't really have a lot of experience in that before, and it made me realize that it’s not particularly something that I would maybe want to pursue, because it’s kind of a lot of pressure to have your income hinging on the fact that you are going to have to discover something new.”
During the project, the team realized that variables that they thought were going to have a statistical impact on prices, like certain players playing, did not have an impact. From the research, Martinez said buying tickets on the day of the game and being flexible would provide for the cheapest prices available.
“It showed me a lot of research is going through data,” Martinez said. “We spent 80 percent of our time sorting through three and a half million rows of data, and we had to normalize that data, turn that data and manipulate it into something that we could work with and evaluate which variables actually contributed.”
Economics senior Joseph Sanchez also worked on a project about prices, looking at the tariff impacts on the local wine industry with economics student Asarel Castellanos and Hamed Ghoddusi, associate professor of finance. During the research, Sanchez spoke with the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, and he learned that the wine industry is an import-heavy market, which meant increasing the diversity of their suppliers is not a solution to the problem.
"I’ve been learning a lot of new things that I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for the research program.”
Thomas Sargsyan
“It was really cool to speak with actual business owners, actual wineries, who were facing these problems,” Sanchez said. “What are problems they are facing and how we can help? And that’s something that I don’t get a lot of experience with –speaking with business owners.”
Associate Professor Jack Wroldsen, who specializes in accounting and law, led a project about the Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) program, an organization that works with children in the court system to give them a voice and advocate for them. Working with animal science junior Moraia Wroldsen and sophomore English major Thomas Sargsyan, the project explored how the CASA program can work better and how business ideas can be brought in to help the system.
“It’s really rewarding to see people go through their first experiences with legal research,” Jack Wroldsen said. “I think, initially, it’s a little bit overwhelming because legal research articles are pretty long, but I’ve really been pleased to see that as Thomas and Moraia have both waded their way through that information, there’s kind of this moment of ‘Okay, now I get it,’ and that’s really the fun part because then we can start brainstorming creatively.”
Two solutions they considered entailed getting a national sponsor to be the face of the organization and exploring how businesses who want to invest in CASA can offer compensation to their employees to volunteer, Moraia Wroldsen said.
Sargsyan worked more on the historical context and background of the organization and helped brainstorm the problems and solutions.
“It’s been a very interesting experience, and I’ve been learning a lot of new things that I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for the research program,” Sargsyan said.
Business senior Lena Nezamzadeh worked on a project with Finance Professor Cyrus Ramezani and fellow student Gustave Stork on research related to the Student Managed Portfolio Project, which enables outstanding finance students to actively manage approximately $1 million in assets.
“The challenges were definitely throughout it. I had to learn how to run simulations, and that’s something I hadn’t done before,” Nezamzadeh said.
