9/15/24
My name is Mark Nelson, and I am a sociology major here at CUNY SPS in my final year of study. I’d like to outline my interests, my educational goals, and why I’m taking an independent study (SOC 380).
I’ve returned to college to study sociology because it has always been an interest of mine. I have literally been a bonafide armchair sociologist since middle school. For every social issue presented in the news, little Marky had a “why” question or “what if” scenario. In my home, “Shut up Mark” became a common refrain shortly after the nightly TV news program started… Even as I grew older and my life and career progressed, my continual naive sociologizing remained a constant.
Now, as I construct my sociological imagination brick-by-conceptual-brick at SPS, I find the academic destination is not to seek employment as a school counselor, or as a human resources professional, but to continue to a graduate degree and ultimately engage in social research using quantitative methods. In this light, I have several academic and professional goals I hope to achieve through independent study. The first is being involved in actual research outside the classroom. Many students go through their entire undergraduate experience without inhabiting professional spaces associated with their major. As a person from the workforce, returning to college, I have a sense of how important it is for the student to develop professional-level abilities, sooner rather than later.
In the workforce, I am a game developer and visual designer. Through these careers I have obtained expertise with a large number of software applications such as Illustrator, PhotoShop and AfterEffects, among others. For social science, the software tools of choice are Excel, R studio, SPSS, Qualtrics, Python, SQL, etc. Unfortunately, while these are commonly used in the field of sociology, my coursework at CUNY SPS will not provide significant exposure to these tools at the undergraduate level. Since I am hoping to work in or adjacent to the field of sociology when I graduate, and while I am in a graduate program, I hope this independent study will give me an opportunity to open a few of these tools and produce work product that I can build upon.
Through this independent study, I also anticipate beginning to build a professional network in the social sciences. For example, fellow sociology students, sociology professors, and others engaged in social research in adjacent fields (psychology, urban planning, data science, etc.). I can’t expect to work on anyone’s public policy proposal with only references from the last icon design project I worked on.
Ultimately, I expect that this independent study will provide me with experiences as close to real-world sociology as possible, using the opportunities available to me at CUNY SPS.
