Students’ work leads to opportunity
Three students in psychology at the American University in Cairo (AUC) will present their research at the prestigious American Psychological Association (APA)’s conference August 14-17 in Boston.
“It’s a distinguished achievement for undergraduate students to be able to present at this conference. It speaks a lot about their hard work, dedication [to the psychology] field and to scholarship,” said Mona Amer, a visiting psychology professor at AUC.
The APA is the largest scientific and professional association representing psychology in the United States and the largest association of psychologists worldwide with 148,000 members. The APA is based in Washington, D.C.
According to Amer, the APA conference is very competitive and had 15,000 attendees last year. “It is the annual event [where] psychologists establish trends and identify future priorities for the field,” added Amer.
Undergraduates Farah Shash and Salma El Sayeh have been chosen to present their research papers on testing implicit religious prejudice in Egypt, while Yasmin Magdy’s study was about street children’s vulnerability, traumas and resiliency in Egypt.
Initially, the presenters had written their research papers for a class and didn’t expect that APA would consider them, let alone that they would be selected for the APA annual conference.
The students said Amer encouraged them to apply to APA in order to have their research published.
“We started the research last semester for the PSYC 208 class in research methods and professor Amer told us about the conference and how to apply, so we first sent the abstract to International Review
Board (IRB) for approval and after it was approved, we applied for the conference,” said Shash, a psychology junior.
“There will be a symposium and a 10-minute presentation at the conference in Boston. The big thing about it is they don’t really accept undergraduate students,” said El Sayeh, a psychology junior.
Shash explained that they chose their research topic because, “both Salma and I had problems with religious prejudice in Egypt so we decided to work on it.”
“I did not think it existed in Egypt but as it has become an issue with the Student Union elections and other events, we decided to try working on this topic,” said El-Sayeh.
El-Sayeh and Shash conducted their research on AUC students and they are still continuing it in an independent study course in the social psychology of prejudice.
“For their study, Farah and Salma tried to reach students of all majors. Their study is quite challenging because they used an experimental design… it’s at the masters level,” said Amer, who is supervising the independent study.
Magdy, 2007 psychology graduate, started her research about street children in Egypt three years ago as a part of an anthropology class.
“I worked on the same subject for my [300 level] English course. After I presented my work at the research conference for undergraduate students, I won an award,” said Magdy.
Magdy then wrote a proposal with professor Amer for the APA conference where they plan to do a poster session.
“Her data with the children is very compelling,” said Amer. “In the field of psychology we value research; if I had a choice I would encourage all students to publish their work,” she added.