Biography:
Hello! I'm Rand, majoring in Psychology and Sociology and graduating with the class of 2026. Outside of school, I enjoy running, trying new food, and reading. On campus and in the community, I'm involved in Centre Helps as a hotline counselor and currently serve as the president and founder of MASH (Mindfulness and Science of Happiness) club where it aims to promote student flourishment on campus. Looking ahead, my tentative plan is to pursue graduate school in Clinical Psychology.
As part of MuGlab and working with Dr. Matthew Carlson, our project focuses on better understanding perception, representation, and categorization when L2 English speakers are presented with vowels categories that are different in their L1. We will be using one-sided and two-sided Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) with a vowel continuum that expands across canonical realizations of English vowel categories to probe how L2 learners respond to fine phonetic detail. In the span of two months this summer, I will be in Mexico City to collect data for the study where our main demographic will be L1 Spanish speakers who have acquired English as their L2.