Research Assistant Training

This past Wednesday I got my first taste of what I will be doing for my Graduate Research Assistantship (GRA). One of the transportation professors, Jennifer Dill, emailed me last week hoping I could come up to do training with the other research assistants so that we'll know what we need to do come the fall. I was excited about this opportunity because I have been feeling academically dormant these summer months and because I would like to have an idea of what my workload will consist of.

The training itself was actually quite interesting, which is impressive given that I had just had a frustrating apartment hunt earlier in the day and was pretty tired. Before I could begin I had to fill out paperwork to become a Portland State employee in order to get paid for this since my GRA does not technically start until September 16. The research project that we are all working on is to see the before and after of family activities once their neighborhoods have been made more bicycle friendly. This is just starting, so what we need to do now is audit the facilities of the neighborhoods, i.e. their sidewalks, lighting, aesthetic quality, etc., to try and set a baseline of what their activities are for this given street environment. After the additional bicycle lanes and other streetscaping is put in by the city, we will do a before and after comparison to see if family activity improved. We are also going to audit a comparable area where there won't be any modifications to essentially use as a control group. There are 3,000 street segments that need to be audited, which explains why there were about 10 people at our training since there is a lot of work to go around.

I am pretty excited about this research and look forward to getting started on it. It's being funded by a foundation that focuses on healthy children, so there is a lot of crossover between urban planning and the public health fields. I was initially concerned that I alone would get assigned an indecipherable task with high expectations, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I will benefit from the support and camaraderie of a whole research group coupled with the recognition that this is well within my capabilities.