I came to Costa Rica expecting to learn a lot in a short period of time. I surely learned a lot about tropical biology, entomology, conservation, and climate change. These aren’t my areas of academic or professional interest, but I was excited to learn about them nonetheless. At the same time, I unexpectedly learned and gained clarity about my research interests and career goals.
First and foremost, I think one thing we have all learned is that conducting research is difficult. Bold statement, I know. It’s doable, and it’s so rewarding to see the final product come from all of your hard work, but it’s difficult.
I was lucky enough to take SPH-H 494: Research and Evaluation Methods in Health and Safety just this spring. In my section of this course, we conducted our own original research projects over the whole semester. Of course, one project or class won’t teach you everything you need to know about research, so there has been plenty more for me to learn here. I made plenty of mistakes in my research that I have learned from. More importantly, though, the freedom we had in designing our research has helped me understand my research interests and career goals.
Kayla’s and my research project investigated perceptions of environmental risk factors of mosquito borne illnesses and snake bites among individuals from Costa Rica and the US. We combed through the literature, accessed public data of environmental and health conditions, and developed and conducted a survey.
This project was a reminder of the value of early, thorough planning. As we implemented our project and data collection, we found lots of things to tweak: background data analysis strategy, our data collection instrument, how we approach people to take our survey, and much more. Some things could be improved as we realized our mistakes, but others couldn’t. For example, once we started collecting survey responses, we couldn’t completely reformat the questions that weren’t very clear. This was frustrating, but working on a time crunch meant we had to just try to get something consistent and comparable pulled together. I’d heard that there is a trade off between setting up an ideal study and actually ever finishing one with imperfections. This project made that truth abundantly clear. The best way to get a good deal in this trade off is with early, thorough planning.
Despite these challenges, this project really helped clarify my future research interests. This has been a surprisingly difficult question for me to answer in the past. As an epidemiology major, I knew that my research interests had something to do with the health of populations, but no singular health condition has stuck out to me. The pattern I have finally noticed between this and other research projects is that it’s not health conditions that interest me, but the perceptions, conceptions, behaviors, and policies related to health. Sure, the science behind envenomation and antivenom development is interesting, but I’m much more interested in how individuals and communities perceive the risks posed by snakes, who engages in behaviors that put them at higher risk, and how to make antivenom more accessible to those that need it. I ask similar questions about mosquito borne illnesses and other health conditions.
In addition to knowing what question you want to answer, doing research also means understanding how you want to answer it. In my case, the questions I want to answer lend themselves to social and mixed methods research. For past research projects, I’ve relied on interviewing friends who would volunteer via my personal social media. Even though it could be difficult to find enough people to volunteer, these conversations were pretty easy. Kayla’s and my research project felt like a whole different ball game. First, as previously discussed, I greatly underestimated the skill needed to develop an effective survey. To me, it seems to be a completely different skill set from developing and conducting interviews. Second, I didn’t anticipate how difficult I would find it to approach people to ask them to take our survey. My introverted personality doesn’t exactly lend itself to that when I’m in my own community, let alone one where I’m visiting for the first time.
Although I may not be able to change my personality, I do see a way I could make myself more comfortable conducting and project like this in the future. Like I said, this was my first time in Costa Rica. I arrived ready to be taught about the culture. My previous travels in the Dominican Republic and Panama, my Spanish studies, class readings, and my own reading prepared me somewhat, but I still didn’t know much about Costa Rican culture in particular. As I learned more throughout my trip, I saw many more opportunities for better research. I also saw opportunities for collaboration that would have made research more representative of a broader Costa Rican experience, more thorough, and more compelling. This, similarly, points to the importance of good preparation, but it also points to something bigger: the importance of investment and focus.
Similar to my research interests, my academic interests seem to pull me in multiple directions. I officially added an anthropology minor just this spring semester, at the end of my junior year. One could see how this would compliment my Spanish minor, but how it fits with epidemiology wasn’t clear until finalizing this research project. It’s important to me to invest in a community, understand language and culture, and then work on public health research and interventions. In other words, I’m interested in borrowing ethnographic approaches from anthropology to improve my public health practice. I’m not sure if these career interests will bring me back to Costa Rica or anywhere else in Latin America to expand on the project that Kayla and I completed this summer, but it does seem like a strong possibility. Even if not, the lessons I’ve learned here – personal, professional, or academic on any number of topics – will surely guide my path moving forward.
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