Communicating to Collaborate

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Jerry Liu ('26), a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, conducted research on how collaboration is achieved through communication under the mentorship of Dr. Delphine Dahan (Department of Psychology) through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program.

This summer, I did research in psychology, specifically the psychology that drives collaboration in conversations. After reading “The Bilingual Brain” by Albert Costa as part of my writing seminar, I wanted to develop the skills I have in math and statistics while also further exploring the topic of the psychology of language that this book introduced to me. This project was the perfect opportunity to combine my interests and develop new skills in research that I can use for future research projects. This topic is important to me because of its application. Communicating to collaborate can be seen everywhere, whether splitting chores or completing projects, and thus it's important to explore the impact of the factors that affect conversation and their influence on successful collaboration. Throughout this experience, I learned how to analyze conversations and the cognitive factors that impact wording and gained a deeper understanding of the nuances affecting how we speak.

I think what was most challenging about this experience was dealing with failure. It was not uncommon to graph and analyze the relationship between two certain variables and to be unable to find any major difference that could be meaningful. When thinking of ways to analyze the data, I ran into dead ends time and time again, and throughout this experience, I developed resilience to these kinds of roadblocks with the help of my mentor. We regularly met to discuss what we analyzed and what information we could obtain from graphing the relationship between various variables, as well as finding new ways to look at the data. As a result of these efforts, I have learned to not be discouraged by failure. I discovered that research is a nonlinear process. In the process of finding results, roadblocks and dead ends are inevitable, but going through this process myself, once a researcher powers through and finds interesting and significant results, the feeling is much more satisfying and exhilarating.

This summer, I learned both technical and soft skills useful for both research and my future career. For instance, one major technical skill I learned is how to do data analysis in both Python and R. Since I am considering a minor in statistics, learning to perform basic data analysis helped me both learn core skills for the job and view what kind of roles a statistician might perform at a company. However, the soft skills I learned can be applied to many different fields, even if I later on decide not to pursue statistics. Throughout the summer, I learned how to work together with both mentors and colleagues to solve problems. I developed problem-solving and communication skills by working with data and learning from the PURM seminars how to effectively design posters and discuss what I did this summer. These skills are important for effectively communicating my achievements and results and can be applied to both future research endeavors and a diversity of workplaces.

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