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Episode 64 - The Social Science of Life in College: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Episode 64 - The Social Science of Life in College

Amy Barnes37min

Dr. Ian Anson

00:00

Ian,

Dr. Ian Anson

00:06

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting, speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

Dr. Ian Anson

00:40

I often get to have interesting conversations with strangers thanks to my profession. As soon as I mention I'm a college professor to seat mates on planes or trains or occasionally automobiles, the acquaintance in question normally has a lot to say about college. Some folks will mention their own experience at college, perhaps reminiscing about a favorite faculty member. Some will opine broadly about the state of college these days.It's normally safe to disregard most of these hot takes because their assumptions about college are often informed more by their preferred cable news pundit than by anyone's real experience. Still, others will wax romantic about how college afforded them the opportunity to meet a special someone with whom they still share an intimate relationship. I relish the opportunity to smile and nod along.

Dr. Ian Anson

01:32

College is an incredibly important time for the formation of students ideas about themselves and the world around them. It's also an important time for the development of social networks that will last many students their whole lifetimes. But as I mentioned earlier, for some reason today's college experience seems to be the topic of a lot of expressly political conversations. Pundits bemoan the idea that students today are struggling to make connections, that they don't go to parties anymore, or that they spend their whole evenings playing video games, or that their smartphones and dating apps are somehow getting in the way of the good stuff. But is any of this stuff an accurate depiction of the modern college experience? Thankfully, we have social science to help us unpack this question.

Dr. Ian Anson

02:13

Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Arielle Kuperberg, associate professor in the UMBC Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health. Dr. Kuperberg recently joined UMBC from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and currently serves as the co chair of the Council on Contemporary Families.Dr Kuperberg is continuing her work on cutting edge topics related to social change in family, sexuality, romantic relationships, gender, work, and higher education among young adults. Let's hear about these developments from Dr. Kuperberg right now.

Dr. Ian Anson

02:50

So today, I'm really delighted to have Dr Arielle Kuperberg here talking about her research into a variety of different topics. And I, first of all, want to start this record thinking about the student experience. Now, obviously I'm somebody who has interactions with undergraduates as a professor at UMBC, but obviously I see the student through a very narrow lens as a faculty member. But you know, your research, I think speaks to the student experience in a way that I can't really see from my perspective in the classroom. And of course, I was also a college student way back in the day, but I perceive, and certainly research speaks to the notion that being a college student is somehow a little different in the 2020s than it was when I was on campus as an undergraduate. So especially, I think, in regards to romantic relationships, other kinds of stressors and things that are impacting students. So I want to ask you, first of all, what's going on?

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

03:48

I went back and looked at some of the data that I've collected on romantic relationships on campus, and it actually it hasn't changed that much since the two, the early 2000s. So the early 2000s people were a little bit more likely to have casual hookups than they are now, but it hasn't been a huge drop. There was a drop in long term romantic relationships before the start of COVID, but since COVID, it's actually recovered a little bit, in part because so many people turn to online dating during COVID and I think for many people, that kind of helps people form relationships. One of the major things, though, that I noticed is there's been a major change in how how people are meeting people, and I think that reflects some of the bigger changes among college students. So in the early 2000s it was something like a third of people met their last hookup through a party or at a bar. Now in 2019 before COVID even started, it was down to 15%. So I think there's a big decline in going to bars. Part of that is tied to college students are just less likely to drink than they were in the past. There's been legalization of cannabis in many states since then, including Maryland, and that's something that tends to be a little bit less social in some ways, that people used to go to bars and in person, kind of activities more and what has replaced it is the internet. So there's been a huge increase, in the early 2000s when we first started studying hookups, and that was I also went to a college in the early 2000s, but when this study that I'm involved with first started studying hookups, it was like less than 3% had met someone on the internet. There were internet dating websites, but people wouldn't admit to using them, and college students didn't have to use them because they had so many more in person opportunities to meet partners. But even before COVID, and especially since COVID, it seems like there's kind of a decline in college students doing more social activities, maybe because some of them are working longer. Another area I study is student debt, and there's been a big increase in the amount of debt that students are going into to pay for college over the past 20 years. So I think in some ways, students are more focused on academics and trying to major in different areas that will pay off more in the long run, because they're very aware that they're taking out huge amounts of debt that they have to pay off later. So maybe they're partying a little less. I think social life in general has shifted online in many ways, but I think many college students are also kind of like there's been a decline in in person, places where people meet up. My research, other research, has also shown there's been a decline in these kind of third places, which is your first place is your home, your second place is maybe school or work, and then a third place is another place that you go where you can meet people. So maybe a bar or a coffee shop or religious services or, like I go to music jams with other people.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

07:13

So there's just been kind of a general decline in society, in those types of places where people go to and at the same time, there's been a rise in people meeting on the internet, which doesn't necessarily lend itself as well to forming sexual relationships, because you're not actually in person with each other, but in some ways, it could lead to things like there's actually been an increase a little bit in dating since the early 2000s, in part because when you meet someone on the internet and then you go and meet up with them, you go somewhere to meet up with them. You don't generally just, like, go straight to their house, because you have to first make sure they're not a serial killer or something. So that means people are like, going out for coffee first before they like, decide what to do, even if they're meeting on something like Tinder. There's been an explosion in dating apps. So Tinder came to market around 2011, and now it's basically the top way that people meet sexual partners and romantic partners. They're, as I said, they're more likely to lead to dates than they are to casual hookups. Because, you know, first you got to kind of feel out the other person, and then suddenly, like you're on a date, basically.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

08:29

But yeah, I think some things we found, some things were kind of remarkably stable. So it was like dating went from like 61% to 63% to 60% which is like, not really movement, like, it's kind of like a little bit over the majority of students are dating in college, are hooking up in college in 20 years ago, dating was a little less common than hooking up, but there was a big media attention to hookups, I would say, in the early 2010s, and I remember this New York Times article that said the date's dead. It's gone the way of the landline, like everybody's just hooking up with each other. And that was never true. It was like dating was 60%, hooking up was like 62%. But the which one is more common has now switched places, so dating is actually a little more common than casual sex, and this kind of follows patterns we see that are more drastic at the high school level, where increasingly people are not having sex, young people are like, having less sex, not having sex as much as a couple of generations ago. I think part of that is related to, you know, at the high school level, things like people getting involved in more organized activities that are supervised, versus, you know, kids in the 90s, they were just like, go ride your bikes after school, and then you wouldn't see them for hours, and nobody had a cell phone. You didn't know where anyone was. Um.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

10:00

Now you're in an after school activity, or after school childcare, after school something that's not called childcare, but actually is childcare. So at that level, I think people are coming to college with less sexual experience than they have in the past, but it seems like once they get to college, they're still kind of doing the same things they were in the past. It's just they're kind of getting to those relationships a little bit differently, as well as society has become kind of more mediated by through the internet.

Dr. Ian Anson

10:30

This is all really fascinating stuff, and I appreciate you sharing it with us. I find it especially interesting in light of, as you mentioned, the media discourse that surrounds a lot of this stuff, it seems like a lot of folks are making hay out of alarmism in this realm, in some cases, by saying things like, oh, you know, today's college students or high school students are incapable of having fun, or they're worried about their inability, potentially, to create enduring relationships because they're not dating. But your evidence here would suggest that, you know, some things are quite different. And, you know, to quote Jeff Goldblum and Jurassic Park, great Life finds a way, I guess. You know, given that we have internet tools to be able to make this sort of work in a very different social context now than what it was like, you know, back when you and I were in college. But I want to get a little bit into how it is that you are able to come to some of these claims using data. Obviously, this is a podcast with the social sciences, so I was wondering if you could tell us about how you actually learn about college students, what kind of methods you use, what kind of data you're collecting, and how that whole process works.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

11:39

Yeah. So I first got involved with this project when I was a grad student, and in terms of helping collect the data. So the big survey I use, and that I'm now involved like we're collecting the second wave, and I'm part of the team that's collecting this data and kind of leading the team. That I'm not the leader, leader of the team, but I'm one of the people in the like five person team that provides the survey and collects it now. So it's a survey. The first wave was collected. I think it's something like 23 different universities around the country. It was distributed in classrooms. So this is something you can do maybe a national survey, but it's like, how do you get the data? And then when you send an email to people who don't know you, the response rate teams tends to be pretty low. I with paying people, I've gotten about like, a 22% response rate, so like one out of five people, and that's when I I'm like, I'm a professor at this university. So there's some kind of, like, you have some sort of, like institutional trust, we would call it there, right?

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

12:48

So for this study, we went through, and I wasn't one of the original researchers, but I kind of was a grad research assistant who helped with it. So it was through kind of personal contacts and reaching out to professional associations. So we reached out to other sociologists through different professional association listservs and asked if they were willing to distribute our survey in their classrooms, basically. And we try to target large intro level. It's usually intro to sociology or courses like sociology of the family or I, you know, sometimes distributed by sex and society class, but courses that tend to attract more than just sociology majors, so that it's a little bit more of a broader like, we don't want to have a study of like, you know, sociological theory courses, right, which, that would be a very select group of students, and then it's been distributed as an extra credit assignment in that class, with which kind of like you can do this, or you could, we also have to give them an alternative that they can do to still get the extra credit.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

13:55

And we've had, like, over an 85% response rate, so pretty high response rate. We're able to get kind of pretty regular high levels of people participating within these classrooms. It's not a representative sample. So that means this isn't like completely, like the exact number of students, but we can use statistical methods to kind of account for the fact that we're collecting at different universities, and responses, we call it a big cluster in different universities. So there may be different university things that are happening in the second wave, we've definitely tried to increase the diversity of types of colleges that we're collecting it at. So the first wave, it was mostly people who knew the original researcher. So most of the schools were kind of Northeast and West Coast, because that's where she had worked, and a lot of them were very elite universities. So in the second wave, we've made more of an effort to reach out to regional colleges, some community colleges, historical black and colleges and universities, so that it's not so that we have more diversity within our sample, and so that we could also do some cool comparisons between different types of universities, and we also increase like numbers of schools in the South and the Midwest, so that it had more geographic diversity. So we're now up to over 30 different colleges who are participating in the second wave, and we've been collecting it since 2019 we collect it every semester, so we send it out to the same set of professors, and we're like, are you still willing to participate? And we have to go through a pretty complicated process to get IRB approval at every single university, and do Reliance agreements like the setup is kind of the hard part, and then it pretty much runs itself for every semester where, like, you know, just a reminder, please distribute this in your classroom, and then we have a page set up so that we can collect the names and it's not tied to the data, and we could send it back to the professors so they can give their students credit for doing the extra credit. But yeah, so the first we've had over 24,000 students. It was collected over a period of six years. Maybe it was 23,000 students, don't quote me on that number, but it was like 23 or 24 and it was collected from 2005 to 2011 and then this one, we've been collecting since 2019so we started this fall 2019

Dr. Ian Anson

16:26

Wow

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

16:28

Thinking part of the original intent was actually some of my collaborators wrote a book about online apps, and they were like, we'd love to be able to use this data to look into like, who's using apps and stuff like that. But the last data collection ended in 2011 and Tinder came out in 2011 and it took a little bit for it to become like hugely popular. So there was very little data on apps from that first wave. So they asked the original researcher if they could kind of revive the survey and do another wave, and she kind of gave us our blessing, and then went on her way. She's like 75 now, and a dean somewhere. So we revised the survey to we kept it mostly the same so that we could compare changes over time, but we added some information on like apps and we revised like the original survey, only asked about condoms as a form of birth control, so we added, like, other forms of birth control. And, you know, made little changes like that, to improve the survey a little bit, and you know, to address some issues that have come up after the original survey was collected. We were like, we wish it had been done this way, but yeah. So we're up to as of last semester, we were up to a little over 11,000 people. And I think, well, we probably add around 2000 or more each semester. So I haven't gotten the data. Like this semester is not over yet, so I haven't gotten the data from this semester yet, but it should be a couple more 1000 people or so. We originally started this in 2019 thinking it would be about apps. And then the first paper that we're probably going to or I'm probably going to publish, because the other people are also working on other papers, but the first paper I'm going to do is basically, how did relationships change over the course of COVID, because COVID dominated the first few waves of data collection. So now we're collecting the data a little longer than we had originally planned, because there's basically several years that were hugely influenced by the COVID pandemic, and we're I think we're expecting to go at least through 2026 but we may continue a little bit longer than that. Yeah, so it's big survey, original survey collection, sexuality data often has this issue of non represent ability. Because, like, if you think of the original Kinsey study, which many people have heard of, he went to, like, gay bars and stuff to find his sample. So there's, you know, many people at the time quoted different statistics, like, you know, 12% of people are gay or something, but that was a hugely biased sample because of how he recruited his sample. And there hasn't actually been a lot of nationally representative samples on sexuality data, like I have another study on BDSM practitioners where it's like, how do you do a nationally representative sample? You would have to go through it's something that like 5% or less of people engage in, or will, like, admit on a survey that they engage in. So you'd have to, like, discard 95% of your sample to even like, get that group. But if you go we went through like, a Reddit group, like our BDSM, and we got over 2000 respondents. So you have to think a little bit differently about how you're interpreting your data, because you can't be like 60% of college students in the United States hook up because of, you know, I found this data set, which is based on, you know, 25 or 30 colleges that were willing to participate and like the professors, happened to see this professional association listserv thing, or were like people we knew, we also reached out to people at certain types of colleges. But you can say this is how things changed over the five years. We looked at the data at these 30 colleges. And since we do have a pretty diverse set of colleges that is going to reflect kind of national trends, and you could look at differences between colleges and kind of inequalities within the data. It's not going to be like this is the percent of college students who do this, but I couldn't tell you, like compared to the same set of surveys we collected 20 years ago, almost 20 years ago, right? 2025, it'll be 20 years since they started collecting that data set, we can say, like, accounting for the fact that, like the colleges, have slightly expanded. We see these different trends over time.

Dr. Ian Anson

20:52

Wow. I can really appreciate the amount of methodological challenge that goes into trying to harness these populations, trying to say something about the incredible diversity of college students. I mean, one thing that really struck me as you were talking is just again, thinking about media narratives, about the way that college students are often represented in the media as being kind of this very homogenous group of people who are largely attending, you know, four year institutions living on campus. You know, probably attending these elite institutions. These are the kinds of people that tend to show up in headlines and in op eds and things like this. But if you kind of look under the hood, right, college students are a much more diverse group that across institution type, across all these different metrics. And it's really heartening to think that you're trying to crack into some of those things to really understand how the college experience may be similar across those contexts and potentially different across time. There's just so much there so much richness. And Dr Kuperberg I mean, there's even more, which is something that I find really incredible about your ongoing trajectory, because recently you hosted a conference at UMBC talking about a bunch of other topics that you're studying, again, truly remarkable in terms of your productivity and focus here. And so this, this was a conference that really caught my attention, especially because the title of the conference, if I got this right, it was called "Families in Perilous Times." So it appears that you're also researching what happens after you know, people are in sort of that college stage, and we're thinking about starting families and thinking about their relationships and child rearing, all that stuff. So if you wouldn't mind just giving us a brief glimpse, perhaps if you would about what went on at that conference, what some of the biggest conclusions were.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

22:37

So that conference was part of the Council on Contemporary Families. I was leading that organization for three years, and now I just agreed to another three year term as co chair. So I'm splitting the work of leading it with someone else. So the Council on Contemporary Camilies is an organization aimed at getting family research in the media basically and accurate, scientific family research that there is a lot of media narratives, as you said, that are kind of biased, I would say or so. First there's the bias of like media people in general, people who are journalists for these kind of legacy media large news, things that you would read, tend to be a pretty elite group to begin with, because the type of people who get those jobs, and then they hang out with other elite people, and then they hear what their kids are doing, and they're like, this is an interesting story, and I'm going to write about that. There's also several organizations that are kind of more socially conservative and have people with them who have PhDs, who regularly write op eds in the media about different family topics, which I would say, from my scientific perspective, tend to present the data in a pretty biased way.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

23:54

So this organization is kind of trying to counter that, and it's been around since the 1990s. One of the original founders was someone who, I think, when, like, Bob Dole was running or something, said something about what was that woman's name, but Murphy, something, Murphy Brown, and I don't know, said something about single parents. And ended up having, like, a big media splash through that, trying to counter some of the things that were being said about single parents. So anyway, so this conference we had was part of, you know, an initiative I took as the leader of the organization, was we had kind of stopped having conferences over the course of COVID and kind of we were like, Let's take a pause and rethink our whole conference format. So our theme was families in perilous times, but it was also focused on family policy. And then part of the conference was also kind of training academics in how to do public scholarship and how to talk to the media. So the beginning half of the conference was about different policies that are currently affecting families and that, in my view, are kind of the targets of current debates. And we held the conference a few weeks before the election, and all of the topics we talked about were topics that were highly debated over the election season. So the four areas it focused on was the fall of Roe versus Wade and abortion laws, anti LGBTQ legislation, and the kind of large increase in anti trans legislation, student debt, which is my area, and immigration and how these specific areas affect families.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

25:39

So some of the takeaways, I think, were basically that these policies have profound impacts on families that tend to be more than the even the person that they're targeting. So for instance, student debt policy, we tend to think about in terms of the individual student and how they're leaving college, but some of the things we talked about were how student debt can also affect the parents of children. Some you know, these Parent Plus loans actually have much worse terms than loans that are available directly to students, but many parents take them out because, of course, they want to help their kids. And then student loan debt affects things like family formation, whether people have kids, whether people get married, it can also affect one thing we talked about was the loan pause during COVID and when it ended, and I've collected some data on what people said they did with the money. So we collected data a few months after the loan pause ended, asking college graduates with student loans, basically like, how did you spend the money during the pause, and how did you adjust your spending in order to start paying your student loans again? Or, for some people, was the first time they were paying on their loans because they had graduated during the loan pause.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

26:55

And a significant number of parents talked about, kind of reducing the amount of reducing the amount of money, taking their kids out of extracurricular activities. Yeah, so something like one out of five parents and they took their kids out of extracurricular activities, or didn't sign them up for activities they typically would. There was another speaker who also has been doing interviewed studies and found kind of similar stories of one person who was able to get their kid guitar lessons during the loan pause, but then they when the loan pause ended, they had to cancel the guitar lessons in the immigration section, they talked about the children of undocumented immigrants, and how, even though many of these children are documented themselves and are legal citizens in the United States, because Their parents are undocumented, they have very limited retirement funds. Often they may not have health insurance. So the type of help that their children have to give to them and have to provide to them, and kind of the burdens on their children. We talked about the parents of trans kids, and also the mental health burdens. Some of the abortion talk was about how women are conceived, and like women's versus children's rights are conceived of in this new legislation. So it kind of it was a lot of different topics. We had about, I want to say, 18 speakers, or something like that, just on the different policy topics. We also had some of the early scholars. We have a mentorship program for new assistant professors and postdocs who are interested in public scholarship. And some of them came and spoke about their research. So one spoke about child marriage laws and child marriage in general, how it's related to often abuse from the family of origin. That people, some people enter into these marriages which are abusive, and some people enter them to kind of escape abusive families that they grew up with. Yeah. And we also talked about some things that can be done to address policies, or maybe change hearts and minds around some of these policies. So we talked to a lecturer here in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies program, who's doing a program where she brings trans and non binary, and I think other queer college students to talk to people at old folks homes, and I think in Baltimore, the Baltimore area, and so that the people in old folks homes could ask them questions in kind of a non judgmental arena and questions they're afraid of to ask their own family members, some, some of who are, like, trans and non binary. So I thought, like some of the things were very hopeful, and it was nice, like it was nice to end that specific session on that topic, but some of them are kind of a lot of it was pretty depressing. And I think in light of the election as well, a lot of these policies are very much in question right now, and there's a lot of anxiety over what's going to happen in terms of a lot of these policies, like, are they going to be changed? Some of them kind of need change. So I would say in the terms of student debt and immigration, these are both policies that have kind of been like the slow boiling fraud policies, where it's gradually gotten worse and worse, or policy changes that were made in the 90s are now affecting more and more people over time, as like the cumulative number of people who are affected by them. I'm thinking in terms of immigration, specifically, the reduction in avenues of legal immigration for people who have less education. So in the 90s, there were some immigration changes that focused on if you're going to be illegal immigrant, often you have to be very highly skilled in order to get into the United States.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

30:41

But there's still jobs for people who are lower skilled, but now we don't grant them legal status anymore. And I think student debt also like it's gradually, like there's been a number of budget cuts over the past 20 years that have led to more and more people being affected by student debt, and more and higher rates of student debt. That ends kind of been a slow boiling frog, but now it's kind of starting to boil over, and we've seen in the past few years a lot of discourse around that. But, yeah, we'll see what happens with the new administration, I guess. Right.

Dr. Ian Anson

31:15

So, if I were a student listener to the podcast right now, I think you're right that there's probably some sources of anxiety for me, if I were listening to some of the topics that were discussed at the conference and thinking about some of the framing around what could be coming next. But I gotta say, if I were a student listening to the podcast, I would also be really galvanized. And I wonder if you might have a brief answer to our last question that I always ask folks who have a teaching facing role, which is to address the student that might be listening, who is feeling a fire, not a frog boiling fire, rather a fire lighting inside of them to do this kind of research, to study what's going on with families, what's going on with students and with student debt, with student relationships, what kind of advice would you give to those students who are hoping to go pro in the social sciences.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

32:01

I think there, at UMBC specifically, I would say there's a lot of opportunities for students to get involved in research while they're still undergraduates. In our department, we have a research practition where you can get college credit. We have to basically be a research assistant and learn how to do research with a professor. I have one student at least next semester, and probably more. I usually at my last position, I had at least one or two students every semester who did something like that. So I would say, if you're interested in research, go talk to your professors who are doing research in the area you're interested in and volunteer or take a college class with them. That's how I got involved with research. I took an independent study with a professor, I think in my first year of college, I was like, I want to be a professor. I had a professor in my sociology 101 class actually, who had us look into PhD programs and the application process as part of an assignment. And I was like, wow, you could actually do this for a living. Like, that's really cool. And I'm like, I want to do that. And I went to a professor, and I was like, I want to be a professor. I heard you're doing research on gender Do you like, would you be interested in me being a research assistant and maybe taking an independent study with you?And I took an independent, I think, I took two independent studies with her, and then after the second one, we were able to write a small Student Professor grant so that I got paid for my last year of working with her. And that research experience is really what got me like I went from a school that probably lower ranked than UMBC, but similar, many ways more for working class environment, not many, well, some people went to grad school, but not a ton. But professors are always happy to get help with research assistance, and I went from there to an Ivy League university for grad school, where the number one thing I noticed about there was only eight people in the year that I went to, so it was pretty exclusive. But the number one thing I noticed was everyone had a lot of research experience, and you could get that as an undergrad. Sometimes it could be paid. There are also grants in our university, I believe, to fund undergrad research, but usually people will want to test you out for a little bit before getting to that level. And I think an independent study, or this kind of research criticisms that we offer is a great way to get involved in research. And you often that's like, that's who I hire when I do have money, is the people who did those independent studies with me. So I would think of it not as a job necessarily, but a way to get the kind of experience. It's more like an internship, right, where you may not get paid at first, but you can get college credit for it so it can contribute towards your degree. And you know, getting involved in research and learning as many skills as possible.So those methods classes, take those right. Like I know in sociology, we have a grad program, a master's in applied research, applied sociological research, and all of our courses at the master's level are cross listed with undergrad levels. So you could start taking those classes and building your research skills.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

35:21

And in sociology, there's actually a fair number of industry jobs where you can work for nonprofit organizations or research organizations. I have a collaborator that works at an organization called Child Trends, which is about doing research on children. There's the National Survey of Family Growth is housed in Maryland, and is, you know, hires researchers every once in a while. The census is here. That does a lot. There's the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So Maryland, I would say, is a great place to get involved in research, whether you want to be an academic researcher or non academic researcher. For many of those jobs, you do kind of need a graduate degree, but as I said, the way I would say to get into those programs is to get involved in research, and even if you don't go to graduate school, it's still work like you could put on your resume too, as work experience.

Dr. Ian Anson

36:15

Dr Kuperberg , thank you so much for sharing your advice. Thank you for sharing a little bit about your journey to the professoriate, and of course, thank you so much for sharing such incredibly insightful, interesting, provocative research with us today. We really appreciate your time and best wishes with all the next stages of these processes.

Dr. Arielle Kuperberg

36:34

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Dr. Ian Anson

36:35

II hope that you continue to interrogate ideas like these as you take a hard look at conventional media narratives about young people and their social lives. It turns out things might be more complex than they seem at first glance, which is why it's always a good idea to keep questioning.

Dr. Ian Anson

36:59

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our acting director is Dr. Eric Stokan, and our undergraduate production assistant is Jean Kim. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland of the UMBC class of 2024. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu. And make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 sponsored events. Until next time, keep questioning.

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