I truly had so much fun with this independent study—it’s an experience I’ll never forget! It gave me a chance to learn actual life skills in a way that centered my passions and pushed me to exercise my creativity and critical thinking.
Working with Ms. Rogers (as well as an advisor from my internship over the summer) I collected data from the Upper School student body, as well as the Upper, Middle, and Lower school faculty examining Autism education and misconceptions. I learned firstly how to par down my original ideas into just a few questions to send out in a form, and Ms. Rogers was super helpful in constantly keeping me focused on my end goals of what I wanted to find out and giving feedback on what questions and language were best to achieve that goal. She was also super helpful in brainstorming how to build off last semester’s study and figuring out that I was interested in addressing misconceptions in our student body!
Even though I kept the questions to a minimum to ensure the survey was quick, I still had plenty of data to organize, code, and analyze. I was super surprised by how many people responded to my survey, and how many people talked to me about it during the day, saying how just filling out the survey made them think about things like the demographics of Autism that they hadn’t really paused to consider before! I’m definitely going to continue coding and reorganizing the anonymous data (because there are SO many interesting aspects of it and there’s always more to discover!) and I’m working with my advisor from my summer internship on potentially getting it published!
The second part of my study has been translating the data I gathered into a format accessible to the general population. Once again, Ms. Rogers was truly invaluable in providing enough feedback to keep me focused on prioritizing the inclusion of certain information while still giving me plenty of room to be creative and original in my thought process and actualization of the project. This part of the process taught me to think critically about what was the best method to reach people in a way that would stick with them. I landed on doing advisory programming and a Kahoot because I wanted to prioritize keeping it short and sweet and personable so people would be more likely to pay attention and remember a few key details. When making the script for this, I prioritized making it personable, fun, and memorable, while still including a lot of professional research and even some graphs based on the data I had collected!! This part of the process was super cool because I was synthesizing actual scientific and professional research that I maybe had a little more expertise in with speech-writing and education/advocacy work, where I was learning to distill complex or various topics into a short focused presentation that reached my target demographic. This also helped me learn that this process is something that I’m very passionate about pursuing in college and beyond!
Overall, this independent study was an amazing experience. It pushed me to think critically about how to start systemic change on an interpersonal level, from thinking about what groups I want to connect with, to gathering data and discovering what areas of misinformation/lack of information need to be targeted and through what methods, and finally finding a way to reach out to that population in the most effective way. I’m super excited to see the results of my advisory programming in January, as well as to share my display with the community, and possibly to continue working on such advocacy efforts for Autism Awareness Month in April!
My Independent Study is for sure one of the top things I’ve taken from high school and I would highly suggest that any student pursue one of their own. My advice would be to find an advisor you trust and connect with because that will help you feel more comfortable with exploring your topic through long hours of discussion, which is one of the best parts—getting to talk about your passions at length to someone with some expertise in the subject!! I would also suggest working on finding a specific tangible goal where you can share your research or exploration with some sort of community around you because being able to do faculty and advisory programming was one of the most rewarding parts of my study and it also really helps you stay focused and have built-in deadlines that still maintain relative flexibility and allow you to have room to explore around a central theme. Also, sharing your research and educating the public about something that you are passionate about is super cool and beneficial for all!!
Thank you for coming on this journey with me!
Kiersten
