In 2017, as part of a group of undergraduate researchers, I participated in the LSE Groups Research Conference. In teams, we had to make an original research project under the theme of ‘Uncertainty’.
My team was made up of 5 students of diverse academic backgrounds. Collectively, we were studying international relations, philosophy, politics, maths, statistics, and economics, allowing us the opportunity to learn from each other’s strengths.
Over the course of the project, I attended extra skills sessions alongside the independent research time. These sessions included learning how to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis, produce literature reviews, and structure reports. The project started with getting to know each other’s strengths, coming up with ideas on ‘Uncertainty’ and agreeing on a topic. With the help of the supervisor, we decided to research terror threat levels in the UK and formulated a research question. The process of discussing an idea and formulating a research question helped me a huge amount two years later when I needed to formulate my own research question for my final year research project.
We had intermittent deadlines during the two weeks for submitting our abstract, literature review, final report, and a copy of our presentation. This required effective planning with my team members to ensure we met these deadlines. One thing I loved about GROUPS is that everyone there is genuinely curious and enjoys the process of researching, so this process was quite fun!
During the year the project took place, there was unfortunately a terror attack in London. This posed a serious challenge for our research ethics, as well as the emotional weight of the incident. It had implications on our ability to conduct in-person interviews so we had to decide on a new research methodology. This process taught us a lot about research ethics, something which is always relevant when conducting research at any stage in one’s research career. It is something I remembered to be conscious of when I conducted my own research later on.
At the end of the fortnight, we presented our findings to a conference of approximately 100 people, which included other participants, supervisors, and some LSE staff. It was a supportive, engaging environment which ended with an intellectually diverse and thought-provoking conference.
The research skills I gained during LSE GROUPS, particularly of research ethics and conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis, were relevant to me throughout the rest of my time at LSE, and I will no doubt continue to use and develop them as I conduct more research in the future.
This has been rewritten and edited based on an original post I made on the LSE website, which can be found here. The original paper can be found here.
Preeti Kaur 