On April, 26 ComArtSci students attended the 21st annual University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) to present their hard work and research. Among these students, Media and Information major Andrea Uglietta took home first place in her category, Digital Media.
Titled Real World Creative Research, Uglietta’s project involved working with a team of fellow associate producers under Media and Info professor Amol Pavangadkar to execute interviews with families from all over Michigan to evaluate how the Government Parenting Program (PMTO) has affected their lives
“I was a bit nervous in the weeks leading up to the presentation, but once I was in the room talking about our project it was easy to showcase all the hard work our team put in and what I had learned throughout the process,” said Uglietta. “I felt extremely grateful for the award and for the opportunity to do research here at Michigan State under such a great mentor, Amol Pavangadkar.”
Undergraduate Research at ComArtSci
Every year, UURAF provides MSU undergraduate students with the opportunity to showcase their research and creative work. Held in the spring, UURAF provides the unique opportunity for undergraduates to gain experience in presenting their work, answers questions an audience and receive constructive feedback from judges. Awards are announced at the end of the day for each category.
Undergraduates covered a variety of subjects from media multitasking to the introduction of MSU TV. Journalism junior Courtney Pasek’s attention was captured by the story of Flint, Michigan. Pasek has a love for storytelling and a concentration in photography, which made her the perfect candidate for professor Judy Walgren’s research project. Together, they came up with a plan to research the media’s portrayal of Flint through images and videos.
“My work shows an overview of the archival research that I have conducted over the course of six months on the old, booming city of Flint, Michigan. I hunted down pictures of schools, industry and the everyday environment of how Flint used to be prior to 2010,” said Pasek. “At first, the results were disheartening, but the more I dug in, the more I found that a lot is being done to restore Flint.”
UURAF award winner Uglietta’s research came in the form of a video project. Starting in the fall semester, she worked with Pavangadkar and fellow associate producers to create a video project on the Parent Management Training Program: Oregon Model (PMTO), which was introduced to Michigan in 2004. This program is an evidence-based structured intervention to help parents and caregivers manage the behavior of their children within the ages of 4-12 to promote positive change in families. For this project, Uglietta conducted interviews, created reenactments and combined footage to make a series of videos about the program.
“I am very proud of what my team and I completed for this project,” said Uglietta. “I didn't realize how much research and pre-production work that was going into this project when I first signed up. Once we had put in the hours, it was very awesome to look back at our footage and see how successful our shoots had been and how much great material we ended up with to create the final videos.”
Although Uglietta is graduating this year and moving into a career with live sports production, she looks forward to continuing her work with Pavangadkar and assisting with any creative research that may arise in the future.
Full List of ComArtSci Undergraduate Research Presenters
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Yuyang Cai: Examining International Student Learning
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Alyssa Fritz, Cayce Warman, Clare Slack and Jocelyn Moraw: Impact of Sentence Length on Lip Contact Pressure in People with Parkinson's Disease
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Lauren Crymes, Megan Jursch and Madeline Elliott: To Help or Not to Help: Gender Differences in Peer Mental Health Intervention
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Shannon Campeau: The Neurotoxic Effects of Lead on Flint's Children and Potential Impact on High School Graduation Rates
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Dylan Kissel: Creating Content to Improve Parenting Habits
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George McNeill, Gabriela Gendreau, Ian Crist, Hanna Wong, Whitney Zhou, Stefani Taska and Ann Desrochers: Sparty & "Sparthan": Exploring the Proteus Effect in Virtual Reality and its Correlations with Campus Pride and Misogynistic Attitudes
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Victoria Topor: Interpreted Political Interest: Experimentally manipulating civic customization to measure exposure to politics on Facebook
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Angela Mulka: Reporting with the Great Lakes Echo
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Anntaninna Biondo: Storytelling in Science
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Faith Holmes: Women in STEM at MSU: Women Faculty in Mechanical Engineering
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Will Johnston and Ellie Locatis: Gamification of Comm Arts
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Jessica Hirsch and Noah Hirsch: Driving, interrupted: Psychophysiological exploration of the effects of listening to music interrupted by ads on driving performance, emotional processing, and task immersion and satisfaction
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Hakeem Weatherspoon: Media Wielding Power? News Coverage of The Black Lives Matter Movement
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Mallory Maxton, Bradley Coster, Zhiying Zhen, Ryan Carlson and Rola Nashef: Dead Ends - A Short Film
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Kirsten Rockey: Age, Speaking Rate and Vocal Effort
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Zoe Kissel and Elizabeth Keller: MSU TV: Growing A Campus Television Channel
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JD Lavaccare: Computational analysis of framing in climate change media, 2012-2015
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Grace Daniel, The Effect of Media Multitasking on Psychological Reactance
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Sydney Chu: Parental Attitudes towards Children's Educational Tablet Use at School
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Kyle Cameron: The Health Belief Model (HBM) as an Interpretive Tool for Communication Research: Understanding HPV Vaccination Rate Attitudes Among College-aged Males
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Andrea Uglietta: Real World Creative Research
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Evan Kutz: An investigative documentary short: Q&A with the filmmakers
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Griffin Stroin: Focal Point News
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Rachel Houtteman and Jessie Magalski: Measuring What Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder See and Hear When Playing with their Parents: A Feasibility Study
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Olivia Hoover: Rap on Flint "Breed" Documentary
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Courtney Pasek: Project Flint