Short Term Job

Yesterday I was hired as a research assistant in the marketing department for a project running through March, when their funding runs out. I will be making $10 an hour* putting kids ages 5-11 through an experiment about fast food choices. This will involve traveling to group meetings (e.g. girl scouts) in towns between Austin and San Marcos, and navigating to these places will obviously be a world of fun for me. Well, I guess I can consider this a sort of cognitive behavioral therapy for my anxiety about driving to unfamiliar places. (And I get paid $10 for the drive time, so it's therapy that pays me rather than the other way around.)

* At least this is the plan, but the professors have not yet gotten final approval of this amount, which is the maximum allowable wage for student-workers.

The graduate students on the project selected 3 undergrads (well, 2 undergrads and me) to run the actual experiments because they are in class in the late afternoons and evenings when most of these groups meet and because they are desperately needing to hit the phones to enroll more groups into the project. (The groups get $10 per kid, so there is something in it for them.)

The hours will be pretty light - under 10 hours per week.

One of my goals for my time at Bobcat High is to get involved in research projects, so this is a good start on that. This will be my first academic research experience in marketing.