Jaiden DeBoe is a sophomore at SIUE where he is majoring in biology with a minor in chemistry. He started his freshman year as a computer science major but switched to biology shortly after the end of his second semester. Growing up, Jaiden always showed proficiency in mathematics. By his senior year of high school, Jaiden was taking a college level Calculus I-II course. He did not know what exactly he wanted to do for work in the future, but he knew he wanted it to be something involved with math. As a result, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a computer engineer. After realizing that he had the skills to do so much more in the world, he decided that he wanted to become a doctor. He switched his major to biology and has since been working on catching up from the classes he missed. His plan is to graduate from SIUE and go to medical school in Springfield, where he hopes to specialize in neurology later.
Month: April 2026
Meetings with both my research team and my community partner will determine the way my research project is presented in the future. With my research team specifically, my individual research project will have to line up with the overall group project. We all have the same goal of finding ways to involve young adults in water conservation efforts, but we are going about it in different ways. Some of us are organizing events, some are creating podcasts, and some are even interacting directly with students at SIUE. The idea is that all our individual projects can be brought together to support one main initiative, but doing so is going to take compromise. We must develop a few core themes to center around in order to make sure that our ideas do not contradict one another. In the end, our projects may not look like how we imagined them to be a year ago, but they will be able to come together to form an even greater group project.
Interactions with my community partner are also going to have a huge impact on my project. Last semester, I drafted my product, which consisted of two separate pieces. Now, I want to ensure that my product lines up with the right information that Heartlands Conservancy wants to obtain and/or needs to portray. I plan to send my early drafts to Anna in order to get feedback on my overall product. Afterwards, I will implement any change that she believes is necessary. Right now, I have no idea what she might ask me to change about my products. These changes could be as simple as rewording a few sentences, or they could involve me adding or removing entire pieces of data from the product itself. So, my entire project could potentially be altered by the feedback given by my community partner.