CES8950 exists because research methodology is a practiced skill, not just a body of knowledge — this internship gives students hands-on experience inside a functioning research project before they're expected to independently design and execute their own dissertation.
Working within a faculty mentor's active research agenda
CES8950 typically places students within a specific faculty member's ongoing research project, contributing to real tasks — literature review updates, data collection, data cleaning and coding, or manuscript drafting — that expose them to the practical, often messy realities of research that coursework alone doesn't fully convey, like navigating IRB amendments or troubleshooting unexpected data quality issues.
Building transferable research skills for dissertation work
The course is explicitly designed as preparation for the dissertation phase — students reflect on what they're learning about research project management, realistic timelines, and the iterative nature of the research process, applying these lessons directly to their own emerging dissertation planning. Students often also gain co-authorship experience or exposure to the publication process through their mentor's ongoing work.
Key topics in CES8950
- Contributing to a faculty mentor's active, real-world research project
- Hands-on experience with literature review updates, data collection, and data coding
- Navigating practical research realities: IRB amendments, data quality issues, timeline slippage
- Building transferable project management skills for independent dissertation work
- Exposure to manuscript drafting and the academic publication process
- Reflective analysis connecting research internship experience to dissertation planning
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Worked example: a lesson learned during the research internship
- Task: Assist a faculty mentor with data cleaning for a survey study on counselor burnout
- Unexpected discovery: A significant portion of survey responses have inconsistent answers on a reverse-scored item, suggesting some respondents didn't read carefully
- Practical lesson: The mentor demonstrates a data-cleaning protocol for identifying and appropriately handling careless-response patterns — a practical skill rarely covered in depth in a research design course
- Application to dissertation planning: The intern builds a similar data-quality check into their own emerging dissertation survey design, having seen firsthand why it matters
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Research internship reflections and dissertation-planning assignments.
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Frequently asked questions
Research design coursework teaches the conceptual and methodological knowledge needed to plan a study — choosing an appropriate design, understanding validity and rigor standards, and structuring a research question — but it typically doesn't expose students to the practical, often unglamorous realities of executing research: recruiting participants who don't respond as expected, managing an IRB amendment when a protocol needs mid-study adjustment, cleaning messy real-world data, or managing a research timeline that inevitably slips. CES8950 exists specifically to give students hands-on exposure to these practical realities before they're expected to independently manage their own dissertation research, on the theory that experiencing (and troubleshooting) these challenges alongside an experienced faculty mentor, in the lower-stakes context of assisting on someone else's project, is a much better preparation than encountering these same challenges for the first time while solely responsible for their own dissertation.
Tasks vary depending on the faculty mentor's specific research project and its current phase, but commonly include updating and expanding a literature review as new studies are published, assisting with data collection (such as coordinating participant recruitment or administering surveys/interviews), cleaning and preliminarily coding collected data, helping prepare materials for an IRB submission or amendment, and sometimes contributing to drafting sections of a manuscript intended for publication. CES8950 is intentionally somewhat flexible in its specific task assignments because the actual educational value comes from being embedded in a genuine, active research process — with its real deadlines, real data quality issues, and real collaborative dynamics — rather than from completing any particular standardized task list, which is why the internship's structure depends heavily on the specific faculty mentor and project a student is matched with.