OURS Student Spotlights
Mikaela Crute
“For my honors senior project, I decided to look into pain management of newborns, as I planned to go into neonatal intensive care nursing. I looked at one procedure that is common in newborn boys – circumcision. My project started with me simply using journals and what was already established in literature, but then it transitioned into me researching hospital policies and interviewing staff at hospitals across Michigan to determine what practices are working and being used, and then what barriers there were to ensure their method of pain management was working.”
“OURS has helped me tremendously in my research as it applies to my day-to-day life at work. I’m now a NICU nurse, and I manage infants' pain daily. I currently work in South Dakota, so I am getting to see how other states are doing pain management and what differs and is the same from practices in Michigan. I am also planning on returning to school to receive my MSN and DNP to be a nurse practitioner, which will help me even more when prescribing pain management methods to my patients."
Mikaela Crute graduated from Grand Valley State University in December 2023 with a major in Nursing. She has completed an Honors College Senior Project, a semester of Independent Study, and has presented at Student Scholar’s Day, West Michigan Research for Undergraduate Science, and had a poster posted on the Michigan Center for Nursing website. She also received a research designation upon graduation. Mikaela is currently working as a neonatal intensive care nurse at Sanford Children’s Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
“I’ve been immensely impacted by McNair both personally and professionally. In my professional life, McNair positioned me to consider graduate school in the first place as well as enter grad school already having primary research experience. Additionally, through McNair I was able to disseminate my research at the Midwest Sociological Conference in 2022. Having MSS be my first ‘big-girl’ conference was intimidating at the time since I was still in undergrad, but it also made presenting my work much less intimidating for me going forward.”
“The McNair programing, along with all my mentors (Dr. Mendoza, Dr. Martin, Dr. Stewart, and Dr. Bair) helped me grow into a much more confident scholar. I entered the program extremely shy and unsure of myself with a constant worry of coming across as unintelligent; I left the program learning how to combat imposter syndrome and understanding there isn’t a single person alive who knows everything; and I truly don’t think I would have gotten that lesson without the program.”
“I chose to engage in research because I wanted to know if my experiences were common and could be explained and validated through data, then if I could use that data to find common threads and begin to trace back to the root of the issue. I feel the dissemination of research, really academia as a whole, is inaccessible. While I understand it is elitist by design, I take great pride in creating and disseminating research that is digestible for most people rather than a select few.”
Amber Anderson (M.A.) was a McNair Scholar at Grand Valley State University who graduated with a major in Sociology in April 2022. Post-grad, she went on to Wayne State University as a Dean’s Diversity Fellow, receiving her Master of Arts in Sociology this past May, with her thesis investigating the effectiveness of uniforms opposed to a dress code within schools. Amber will be continuing at WSU in the fall to work towards earning her doctorate degree.
Amber Anderson