Renee’s Nomination
I strongly nominate Renee McCauley for the OSCAR Excellence Award. I met Renee in February of 2022 through the Undergraduate Psychology Honors Program. I agreed to mentor her project on, “The Intersection of Accent, Ethnicity, and Gender in Job Interviews”. I have been thoroughly impressed with her motivation to excel on the project beyond the honors course requirements, including aspirations to publish the project in a top tier I-O journal and present the work at a national conference. With this mindset, Renee has taken advantage of many opportunities to enhance her skillset. For example, I enrolled her as a user in my graduate level research methods course and she took advantage of absorbing all of the information through videos, learning resources, exercises, and even attending weekly live office hours. Renee continues to learn about the field by attending our weekly learning series, as an undergraduate student. She has been selected twice for GMU’s Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (USRP) and once for a Mason Impact MINI grant. Renee has immersed herself in research by working in Dr. Stephen Zaccaro’s lab and closely working with Steven Zhou, resulting in one publication and a few projects in progress.
The culminations of these experiences have led to several observations. First, she exhibits incredibly strong writing skills. Her thesis proposal received an “A+” and was noted by all faculty, including Dr. Jennifer Brielmaier, Dr. HoKwan Cheung, and myself, as demonstrating high writing quality. She also has three successful grant submissions under her belt, including funding from the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program for the Spring and Summer terms, as well as the Mason Impact MINI grant. During the Fall 2023 term, I invited her to contribute to an IOP commentary (with a two week turn-around time) and was impressed with her contributions and offered co-authorship. Second, Renee exhibits high levels of critical thinking skills. As a researcher, I am blown away by her attention to detail. She is working to ensure that results are not skewed due to a confound variable, whether it be length of time the candidate speaks or a particular accent being less understandable. In order to thoroughly explore the interaction of variables in her research topic, she is pursuing an ambitious 18-condition study with strong justifications for each condition! Third, Renee is an independent and hard worker. We meet weekly and I may give some direction during this time, but she follows through and produces near-finished products. Fourth, Renee is incredibly professional. She carefully drafts correspondence to a variety of audiences, including scholars in our field as well as outside of the field. While working on the IOP commentary, colleagues (a program director from another institution) noted Renee’s professionalism and how her contribution to the project was more in the scope of a collaborator vs. a student contribution.
Over time, Renee has become more certain about her educational and career goals. In a short timeframe, she decided to apply to the doctoral program and take her GREs. She has performed extremely well in coursework, the honors project, research lab, on the GREs, and more. She was one of the few selected into our prestigious doctoral program and she will continue on this trajectory of contributing to the Mason community and broader field of I-O psychology.
Please give this talented candidate your best consideration.