Week 12/Conclusion: Goodnight

Welcome back to my blog for the final time. This is really it, we have arrived at my concluding blog. I still can’t believe how fast time seems to fly. I wanted to update you on my progress over the last two weeks. I wanted to primarily inform you that I submitted my final research paper earlier this week, following advisor review. 

I also completed my final presentation slides, which I will link here. As of this blog post, I have recently presented my final presentation at Shapeshifter Lab. I hope everyone who was able to attend learned something from my presentation, whether it was the importance of proper sleep hygiene or the differing effects of sleep deprivation on academic subjects. I hope I did a good job communicating my findings, research process, and where future studies can improve upon my work. I want to thank everyone again who attended my presentation, and I thoroughly enjoyed viewing my peers’ presentations as well.  

Returning full circle to my research question and hypothesis. My guiding question for my senior project involved investigating the relationship between sleep deprivation, memory consolidation, and academic performance, with a focus on the differences between STEM and Humanities subjects. I correctly hypothesized that STEM performance would be more affected, and that weekend recovery sleep would be partially effective. Across both the survey and memory recall assessment, STEM performance was significantly more correlated with sleep duration than humanities performance. Additionally, the memory test showed that STEM memory recall dropped significantly, while humanities remained constant. Furthermore, recovery sleep was moderately correlated with additional weekend sleep duration. That being said, future research should address the limitations of this study. Specifically, future studies should incorporate larger and more diverse samples, as well as use objective physiological sleep measurements (i.e., actigraphy watches and polysomnography). 

Finally, I would like to summarize the lessons I learned from this senior project and my experience through my on-site placement. I concluded that major educational interventions are needed, including delayed school start times, weekend sleep recovery, sleep hygiene curricula incorporation, and rewritten schedules. At my on-site placement, I learned how to better communicate with patients, assist staff in essential office tasks, and analyze sleep data. Additionally, through my senior project, I strengthened my understanding of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, statistical analysis, and data interpretation.

I want to thank my faculty advisors, Mr. Head and Ms. House, and on-site advisor Dr. Jancie Lau, for their crucial roles in my Senior Project. And I want to lastly thank everyone who has been following my blog throughout this journey. I couldn’t have done it without your support. Signing off, Nate.