Poly-cepha What Now?

AP Research students describe their year-long projects, prepare for presentations

Kaitlyn Nash | Co-Editor

There’s only one class where one student could be working on a presentation on artist Will Wood and another could be studying the complex networks that physarum polycephalum has to travel through.

AP Research, the second course in the AP Capstone program which starts with AP Seminar, allows each students in the class to choose a singular topic to research throughout the year that they will give a 20 minute presentation and write a 5000 word essay on, submitting it to the College Board at the end of the year. After months of research, planning, and hard work, these amateur researchers were ready to give their final presentations, which occurred on April 3 and 4.

“I'm mostly studying how emotions may go and reflect themselves inside of writing whether or not we notice it [and] seeing how that translates as opposed to previous research, which is just how writing influences emotion,” senior Gabby O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell decided to do their research on a subject close to their heart; creative writing. They wanted to see how much a student's emotions translated into their creative writing projects over the course of a year.

“Out of the 32 respondents I only got nine actual work submissions,” O’Donnell said. “I was trying to draw data in such a short amount of time. I could have done it over the whole year, but then it was only two weeks and then there was a lot of fluctuation.”

Junior Carlos Rodriquez, however, focuses on a completely different subject: science.

“It's about physarum polycephalum and how it's acellular,” Rodriquez said. “It's a mix between fungi and bacteria, but it's its own genus so it's able to form complex networks around vital food sources. The gap between my research is that nobody's done it on more complex manmade networks, such as the US power grid system, which has a lot of failures. I was gonna try to make a model to show that the efficiency of physarum polycephalum could be more effective than the current power grid system.” However, Rodriquez’s slime conquest experiment turned out to be a bit sticky in the end. He now recommends future AP Research students to choose something a bit less ambitious.

“I didn't have a guard gel, which stimulates growth in experimental settings,” Rodriquez said. “So when I put the physarum [polycephalum] in the experimental mode, it was just reproducing, it wasn't actually looking for the food sources because the guardrail basically acts as a road. I recommend doing case studies instead and code, even though it seems like more work, I guarantee you, that's the right way to go.”

On the same experimental route, senior Ambereen Haq decided to take her research to the road.

“My project is about the effect of different music genres on teen driving behavior,” Haq said.

“I'm trying to see if one genre of music can cause more aggressive driving compared to other genres of music. Personally, I always observed my parents driving really aggressively to rock music and pop music and I was like, “Wait, does that same thing occur for teenagers,’ because I've never actually seen a study conducted regarding this on teens.”

Her musical research took a turn that Haq wasn’t exactly expecting in her hypothesis.

“My original hypothesis was that classical music would elicit less aggressive driving compared to other music genres, but that actually turned out to be wrong based on my experiment. I had a control group where the participants weren't listening to any music, so that proved to actually elicit the least aggressive driving,” Haq said.

On a similar musical note, senior Mateo Garcia decided to base his research on one of his favorite artists.

“I am focusing on the effects of music and how it can affect a community's mental health,” Garcia said. “I am covering Will Wood. [He’s] not exactly a popular artist, but some people may know him. The two albums I'm doing, purely because of relevance reasons, are one The Normal Album and two the most recent one, ‘In Case I Make It.’”

Though Garcia is not completely done with his analysis, he does have a certain hypothesis regarding his study.

“The main [hypothesis] that I was focusing on was if a musician has a certain viewpoint, then the community will probably likely reflect that viewpoint,” Garcia said.

The end of the year brings with it the end of AP Research for these students. However, students are still able to reflect on the importance of the class and recommend it to incoming juniors and seniors.

“I think the class is really fun,” O’Donnell said. “I wouldn't say it's easier but it's a lot nicer to go and have a project and see how it develops and be able to take time on it. I think it’s pretty nice being able to research something that I'm interested in.”