Hey RC students, Sara Caudle wants you to know something – Your health could determine what grades you get.
Caudle is a busy Roanoke student. The senior from Lancaster, Va., has a double major in business and economics. Also, she is a member of the International Business and Economics Honors Society, and she works in a campus computer lab and for Roanoke’s Athletics and Economics departments.
As if those weren’t enough, for the past year Caudle has been hard at work on a research project that she hopes will change the way college students think about their health and academic performance.
Recently, Caudle was chosen out of 3,500 students to present her research, “Beer, Pizza, and Cigarettes: Is student behavior hazardous to GPA?” at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research at Weber State University in Utah.
Caudle will be the second RC student to present at this conference, which is in March. Tyler Rinko ‘11 presented his research on the European debt crisis and its effect on U.S. exchange rates at the conference last spring.
Caudle hopes her research will be published in the NCUR Proceedings, a journal that contains a select number of research papers presented at the conference. She also plans to submit her paper to a few other undergraduate research journals.
Caudle said she can’t share the results of her research before the conference, but she hopes that through presenting and publishing her work, she will be able to illustrate the importance of health to college students and serve as a model for the kind of research that undergraduates are able to do.
We caught up with Caudle to find out more about how she conducted her research and the ways that she expects it to impact students nationwide.
RC News Blog: Tell us about your research.
Sara Caudle: To basically sum it up, I took a health and labor economics class, and I learned that your health affects your productivity in the workplace. From an employer’s standpoint, [an employee’s good health] saves them a lot of money. So, I went to Dr. Kassens [a Roanoke College professor] and presented the idea to continue doing research on this topic. I thought about taking the idea and applying it to college students, because there were very few studies that had been done on health and college student productivity. So basically, I’m looking at student behavior; how many times they exercise, where they eat, how many alcoholic drinks they consume, cigarette smoking, and BMI, and how that affects their GPA.
RC News Blog: How did you carry out this research? How long have you worked on this project?
Sara Caudle: First, I had to come up with a survey to send out to the student body. Dr. Kassens helped a lot, because without her I would have left out so many things from the survey. We had to make sure there weren’t any holes or missing information. We sent out the survey to [Roanoke College] students twice, two weeks apart. I got about 437 responses, which was a really good amount of data.
I also have control measures, which we use in basic economics to control for bias, so in addition to the factors we want to study, we also look at their class standing, major, gender and race. Then, I run a regression analysis on it using economic software to figure out which variable has the biggest impact on GPA.
It’s been a fun project, because I started it when I was a junior, so with each class I take, I keep building on the project. It’s been a tough paper to write.
RC News Blog: How do you expect your research to impact people? What do you hope people take away from your research?
Sara Caudle: College students are the ones going into the work force, so if we can educate college students now, we could positively impact their health habits and productivity. I want to prove that your health can impact your GPA. I think it’s important for college students to know. I really want to get this paper published. There hasn’t been very much research done in this area.
RC News Blog: What are you most excited about for the upcoming conference?
Sara Caudle: It will be exciting to represent Roanoke College and the Economics Department. This is Dr. Kassens’ second student [to present] at a national conference. My name is on the project, but she has put in just as much time as I have, and I couldn’t have done it without her. I hope that she gets the credit that she deserves, because she works really hard. To see all the things she has going on and to know that she’s also put two students in a national conference says a lot about her as a professor.
RC News Blog: Are you nervous about presenting your research at a national conference?
Sara Caudle: I think presenting is pretty nerve-wracking. I’ve presented a lot at Roanoke and at the Federal Reserve, but there will be people there from all over the world, so I want to make sure I don’t make Roanoke look bad or anything. But I just have to remember that I’m the expert on this project. I still have some loose ends to tie down before I go, so I just want to make sure everything is ready.
{ 0 comments }
