How Team MORALS was Formed
A little bit of background: each Gemstone cohort is divided into approximately 12 teams, each team consisting of eight to 14 students. How are the teams determined, you may ask? It is determined entirely by the students of the cohort, who vote on their top choices for three rounds of voting. The Class of 2017 cohort started off with 48 potential projects. After the first round of voting, that number was cut down to 21, and then to 13. Finally, our cohort was left with 12 teams, with each team’s research either completely student-proposed or proposed by a UMD faculty member and presented by a Gemstone student through a project sheet.
Before projects are allowed to continue through the second voting round, they have to be vetted for feasbility by an expert in that field. That was where Dr. Dwyer came in. The experts that review the projects do not necessarily have to become team mentors; however, MORALS was fortunate enough to find a mentor in its expert. Two team members, Sudipta and Lara, had taken one of Dr. Dwyer's honors seminar the semester before, so they were very excited to be working with a professor they had previously worked with.
During the voting process, many of the current team members contacted Natalie, the original author of the project, to show their interest and discuss the goals and direction of the research. The great thing about Gemstone is that the research process is very fluid; as teams conduct their literature reviews and gather their data, the research question or specific focus can change a lot. Many graduated Gemstone teams will tell you that the research they proposed during their freshman year was not the research they ended with in their senior year, but that's how you learn from the experience. Almost all of the students who originally contacted Natalie became official members of Team MORALS, so it was nice to sort of know who was going to be on your team in the end, if the team made it all the way through (which it did!).
After all the teams were formed, we had Team Building/Bonding Night, where all the 2017 teams did group activities in order to get to know each better and get a feel for their group dynamic. In the following few weeks, we had team meetings moderated by a Gemstone upperclassman, in order to develop team norms, research goals, and potential obstacles we would face in our research. We're looking forward to digging deeper into our research, but remember: it's a big learning experience, so things could change a little bit over the next months. Hopefully it won't take us as long as Sheldon to realize if we need to change direction! Regardless of where our research takes us, we hope you'll continue to keep updated on what we're doing. Stay tuned!
