Texas A&M University-Commerce will be sending 89 students to the Ninth Annual System Pathways Student Research Symposium at Texas A&M University in College Station on Nov. 11.
A&M-Commerce will have representatives from the McNair scholars program, and the science, humanities, and social sciences going to present their research at the symposium, along with hundreds of other students in the A&M system and a chance to win Best in Category awards for their presentations.
“I’m presenting a poster over the research idea for my undergraduate honors thesis over the arboreal behavior of rat snakes,” graduate student Jerrod Tynes said. “It’s basically the climbing behavior of the snake. It’s my first time going so I’m excited.”
Junior Mary Mason will also be presenting at Pathways for the second time.
“I’ll be presenting a poster on protein interactions in a neurodegenerative disease called Mast syndrome,” she said.
Preparation for the symposium typically takes students months of research and preparing either a poster or oral presentation.
“The oral presentations are easier to prepare for, in my opinion, because posters take more preparatory work,” Tynes said. “They both are extensive. Mine includes background research on previous rat snake behavior studies, an outline of my experiment that I used to collect data on my snakes, stats over the observations, and a discussion about the results.”
Mason has been researching Mast syndrome for more than a year, and feels ready to present her research.
“I’ve been working in Dr. Hanna’s lab since I was a freshman,” she said. “But I started working on my own project last year. So I’ve been working on this project for about a year and a half.”
The Pathways Symposium has proven to be a learning experience for Mason.
“I went last year and really enjoyed going. It gives me a chance to interact with other researchers and find out about other projects,” she said. “I’m really excited about going again this year. It’s an amazing opportunity.”