I enrolled in Massasoit Community College's Liberal Arts Transfer-Science program in 2014, and graduated with a bachelor's in Psychology from UMass Dartmouth in the summer of 2018. As an undergraduate, working as a research intern and research team leader through the Massasoit STEM research program provided me with the opportunity to work cooperatively with my peers, helped foster a passion for research, and laid the foundation for a career within the field of research. I gained further experience developing research projects and conducting research through the Commonwealth Honors Program.I enrolled in UMass Dartmouth's masters in Research Psychology program in Fall 2018, and graduated with an MA in Research Psychology in January 2021. In addition to being a full-time graduate student, I worked as a Graduate Assistant/Teaching Assistant from Fall 2018 to Spring 2020. I began researching the topic of food insecurity on college campuses as an undergraduate through the Commonwealth Honors Program. As I continued this research into my graduate studies, I began exploring this topic with more complexity. My master’s thesis involved the exploration of a mediation model that examined how hunger and physical, psychological, and social health measures mediated the relationship between food insecurity and academic performance. Through my continuing research on food insecurity, I gained experience with all steps of the research process, including conducting literature reviews, drafting project proposals and reports, putting together materials for IRB applications, cleaning data sets and performing statistical analyses, and became proficient in the use of statistical software programs (e.g. SPSS and AMOS).