Editor's Note: This story originally ran on the UChicago News website and is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at the University.
A career advancement newsletter ad caught Adam Leybovich-Gilkin‘s eye. Interested in a paid research assistantship with a University of Chicago faculty member?
“That sounds perfect for me,” thought the rising third-year student in the College. “Why don’t I apply?”
The Summer Institute in Social Research Methods (SISRM), an initiative begun by Dean of the Social Sciences Division Amanda Woodward, was created to solve a “matching problem.” At campus coffee shops and library carousels, sit College students eager to gain real research experience. Tucked in offices and labs are faculty in want of trained—and paid—research assistants.
“The Institute was designed to bring undergraduates into faculty research projects in a way that lowered the barriers,” said faculty director Paul Poast, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, “and to not divorce the fact that these undergraduates are receiving an education at a major research university from their experience in the classroom.”
The program’s seventh summer kicked off with over 80 students from UChicago, Chicago State University, City Colleges of Chicago and the Insper Institute of Education and Research in São Paulo, Brazil.
For five weeks, students took methodology courses—everything from econometrics to archival methods to GIS mapping—and participated in weekly talks with social scientists. Each student then put their coursework into practice as research assistants, hand-matched with projects that spoke to their interests.
“If you want to go from knowing nothing to feeling like you can design a research question, this program will teach you that in five weeks,” said Isabela Ávila Ríos, a rising fourth year in the College. “Do it. You’re going to thank yourself.”
Grounded in theory, gained with practice
Ávila Ríos, a political science major, already has her own education consulting business focused on student equity. As a high schooler, she spoke to Chicago Public School administrators and the mayor’s office, advocating for the needs of undocumented students.
But there was one skill she still wanted under her belt: archival research.
“I knew that if I wanted to go into some type of research in the future, these skills are important,” said Ávila Ríos, who will begin her joint Master's in Social Science this year with a focus on education policy.
In her archival methods course, Ávila Ríos learned the theoretical—as to what makes an archive—to the practical—how to organize your findings. Her classroom lessons immediately came into play when Ávila Ríos joined a research project led by sociologist Maximilian Cuddy on the effects of a CPS school merger.
One of Ávila Ríos’s tasks as a research assistant was to look at historical newspapers from the 1960s for mentions of school segregation and budget cuts. She was intrigued by evidence of federal pressure.
“The Education Department actually had to get involved. They were like, ‘Hey, you're being too slow to desegregate. We need to move this along,’” Ávila Ríos said. “Eyes were on Chicago; that was really interesting.”
Ávila Ríos says her summer at SISRM made her feel more grounded and excited to start her master's degree. “I feel a lot more confident in myself that I can do it because of this program,” she said.
Cultivating ‘academic curiosity’
Leybovich-Gilkin and Ronald Kan spent their summer tracking war.
The rising third years both served as research assistants to Poast, whose Correlates of War dataset plots all wars since 1816. Freely available, the dataset aims to provide accurate quantitative data to researchers.
“Our specific part of the project is really from the year 2000 onwards,” said Kan, an economics and political science major, “trying to find all of those wars with all the battle deaths on either side.”
The challenge, both discovered, is finding credible third-party sources.
“A lot of countries like to lie about their deaths,” Kan said.
“We don't want our research to be pushing certain narratives,” added Leybovich-Gilkin, a political science and Russian and Eastern European studies major.
In his social science research methods course, Leybovich-Gilkin learned about the importance of replicability, the idea that any experiment, using the same sources, should come to the same conclusions if replicated by another researcher.
“The Correlates of War dataset helps a lot with replicability, because everyone is kind of starting from the same point,” Leybovich-Gilkin said.
Kan, who took computational social science methods, postulated on the use cases for the dataset—from mapping a country’s GDP growth to understand the economic effects of war to syncing with other datasets.
“Having the raw data itself gives you something to manipulate,” he said, “to find something in the academic literature that has not yet been found.”
In their respective courses, both students developed their own research questions, an essential skill for their potential career paths. Leybovich-Gilkin is interested in a career in international relations, Kan in academia.
“Research experience is what I was mostly coming into this for, but I also came out with a much greater appreciation for the social sciences as a whole,” Leybovich-Gilkin said, “a lot more academic curiosity, and insight into how to actually satisfy that curiosity.”