Each day, about 110 Franklin College students open Angel, fill out their detailed time log for the day, and submit it to the drop box by 5 p.m. For 14 days students followed this routine.
Junior Hilary Hauguel, a math major, created a study to analyze student’s time management and behavior. It all started with a question about which majors spent the most time on homework and studying.
According to Hauguel, she knew she spent a large amount of time doing homework as a math major and wondered how other areas of study compared. In a conversation with assistant professor of mathematics Dr. Justin Gash, the idea to do a research study formulated.
At the beginning of the year, Hauguel sent a mass campus announcement for students who would be willing to participate in the survey. Participants would receive $50, and would be required to fill out a time log each day.
Gash and associate professor and chair of English Dedaimia Whitney are co-advisers to Hauguel’s research project. They helped Hauguel create and shape the template for the study.
“I made a template,” Hauguel said. “I did it myself, so I would know what I was doing and what I was expecting them to do. So I gave them an example of a couple days that I did, and gave them the template.”
Hauguel created an Angel page with drop boxes open from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the participants to log their hours. There are multiple statistics that Hauguel plans to extrapolate from the data, but she is focused on two categories.
“Basically there are 10 categories that I asked them to do,” Hauguel said. “The most important is I wanted to know how much time they spend in class and how much time they do homework.”
The categories range from logging how much time they spend eating, participating in athletics, sleeping, being in class, doing homework, working, etc. Hauguel also hopes to learn more about students’ sleeping habits and it’s possible affects, once she computes all of the data.
“We think that there’s going to be great interest in this,” Whitney said. “And that we’ll find out some interesting things.”
Gash believes that the project will spark an interest on campus as well, and hopes other student’s can see by this project that undergraduates are capable of authentic research.
“She has done something that people will care about,” Gash said. “It’s going to matter to people. She doesn’t have a Ph.D., she just had a really interesting question and a drive to investigate. “
Junior sociology major Heather Myers enjoyed participating in the study and taking the time to think about her daily schedule.
“I saw that I usually slept about the same amount of time, which I didn’t really think that I did that, or that I had a sleeping pattern,” Myers said.
Sophomore math major Matt Brems felt the study helped him to analyze how much time he spends involved in activities correlating to each category.
“I can better manage my time and say, ‘should it really take me six hours to work on this assignment’ or something like that,” Brems said. “So it’s useful for managing time and just learning for myself. It’s a good way for us to quantify our priorities.”
The project is ongoing and according to Hauguel, will probably continue into next semester.
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