Jared McFarlane, a neuroscience Ph.D. student at BYU, has begun a research project investigating the ways social media may affect attention and memory.
An essential part of getting a Ph.D. for any student is to conduct their own research project and defend their work in front of several faculty members in their college. This process begins with selecting their research topic.
While in high school, Jared McFarlane became interested in the way that people learn and what affects human memory. When it came to narrowing his research topic for graduate school, however, he was unsure where he wanted to aim his focus.
“I guess you could say that I was stressed out in trying to pick something and procrastinating a little bit, and I found myself spending a lot of time on YouTube shorts,” McFarlane said. “Adjacent to that, I was having a harder and harder time focusing on reading papers to prepare.”
Because of his own experience with short-form video content, McFarlane chose to investigate the way that it might impact people’s attention span and memory.
Another important element of graduate school is having an advisor who will guide you as you plan this research project.
McFarlane worked with Brock Kirwan, who has a Ph.D. in psychological and brain sciences, for the first couple years of his program.
“I was impressed with him because he came in, not with a specific research question, but with more of a conception framework of ‘here’s how I’m thinking about choosing a research topic,’” Kirwan said.
According to Kirwan, this was a unique trait of McFarlane. Kirwan shared that this was the only time a student had come in and also been so methodical about choosing a research topic.
Unfortunately, Kirwan ended up taking a position at the University of Pennsylvania and could not take his graduate students with him.
McFarlane showed resilience in this challenge of finding a new advisor for his Ph.D.
“He approached me with solutions ... so rather than this being a project that I’m driving and him needing me to tell him what to do for his grad program, he’s really taking ownership of the whole process,” Kirwan said.
McFarlane’s wife, Ashley Zollinger McFarlane, shared how much he has grown over the course of his Ph.D. program.
“I feel like for a lot of people in Ph.D.s, I've heard that, you know, having a kind of imposter syndrome is fairly common,” Ashley McFarlane said. “He did deal with that for a while at the beginning and just seeing him kind of get through that and gain confidence realize that he does know stuff and he does learn things well and he is doing a good job has just been really good for me to see.”
McFarlane found a new advisor and is beginning the process of gathering participants for his first experiments.
He shared his gratitude for all the people involved who have helped him to get to this point in his program.