[ad_1]
Lexington, Virginia, March 28, 2024— Adam Hoffman ’24 was inspired by Virginia Military Institute’s strategic admissions program and his helping instincts led him into his honors research topic.
As an honors student, he needed to study a topic, so when he started looking at VMI’s enrollment and recruiting efforts, he knew he’d found something that interested him.
“I found answers to three questions — how did the trainees discover VMI, why they decided to come here, and how did they do once they got here,” he said.
He was surprised by what he discovered, especially about how future trainees would discover the institute.
“The most common way people learn about VMI is through their parents, which is surprising. Alumni and current students play a smaller role than I thought,” he said.
As part of VMI Honors Week, Hoffman presented his essay, “Virginia Military Institute Recruiting: How Cadets Find Their Way Here.”
He began his research last spring. He spends an average of about three hours a week on research, including understanding how VMI recruits, sending surveys to cadets and talking with administration. Through his research, he said, he gained a better understanding of statistics and a clearer view of current issues. He now aims to focus on his messaging plan to the government.
“For significant change to occur, we need to resolve issues between the Corps, the government and the alumni. I think now is a great opportunity because next year we will have a new commander and a working group of cadets involved ,”He said. “It would be a good thing to change people’s perceptions of what’s going on here.”
He sees a tough recruiting season for VMI’s Class of 2026. His research aims to understand the effectiveness of past resources in recruitment, specifically by studying trainees from the past four years. His paper also looks at how trainees recruited before COVID-19 compare to those recruited after COVID-19 in 2027.
“With this and many other variables, I will seek to find the highest-yielding strategy for future cadets,” his paper states. “I will also look for those cadets who have high grades and high performance at VMI to see how they are Particularly attractive.”
Col. Sarah Whipple, assistant professor of psychology, was Huffman’s advisor on the study. The two meet weekly to make sure everything is on track. When they first met, it was primarily to flesh out the specific research questions for Hoffman’s project.
“While Adam already had his own ideas, we worked together to blend his college admissions interests with psychological concepts,” Whipple said.
The biggest step was making his Institutional Review Board application, which Whipple said is required whenever someone is involved in research.
Whipple said she was both personally involved and hands-off in Hoffman’s plans. She also recognized his passion for understanding effective recruiting methods. She said the experience allowed Huffman to connect his interest in VMI recruiting with the skills he learned as a psychology major, specifically: ethics training, reading and critiquing empirical papers, designing research methods, analyzing data , and ultimately writing and publishing the research report. Paper.
“The impact of Adam’s research on VMI recruitment was his primary motivation for completing this particular project,” Whipple said. “Adam’s research examined the most common ways in which trainees first learned about VMI, their main motivations for attending VMI, and their levels of happiness after the institute. Among other things, he found a link between family as a motivator and happiness. Also That said, although his sample size was reasonable (300 trainees), further research using a fully representative sample is needed before we can be confident in the reproducibility of these findings.”
Whipple said Hoffman was very interested in the subject. Despite some obstacles related to writer’s block and statistics, Huffman persevered.
“Adam showed confidence when talking about his research methods and results. He knew he could go from formulating an idea/question to getting an answer,” she said.
Laura Peters Shapiro
Photos by Kelly Nye
Communications and Marketing
Virginia Military Institute
[ad_2]
Source link