Elevator Pitch

      

Alcohol Effects of College Students

       Dr. Fran Sessa, my name is Corinne Bohnel and I’m interested in the discipline of psychology and I’ve done some research and found that you are as well. I’m happy that I’ve ran into you for the reason that I want to do a project relating to the consumption of alcohol in college students and how it effects their social and academic life. I also am curious in investigating what the main cause of drinking is. Is it external factors that influence adolescents (such as peer pressuring friends) or is it more internal (wanting to drink to release stress or a distraction from something stressful in life). I noticed you are a member of the Abington campus Personal Support team and crisis intervention team, so I imagine you have seen firsthand what kind of things college students are struggling with in their lives and need support and guidance to help them get through rough patches. A lot of kids use alcohol as an escape, but what they might not realize is, it’s an escape that only lasts a few hours, and eventually can lead to a bigger, more detrimental problem. This is a risky behavior, something that I also noticed you study. I was wondering if you would be kind enough to help me with my project?

Example rubric & elevator pitches

WP2 Feedback Matrix

	Did Not Meet Expectations	Met Expectations	Exceeded Expectations
Argument/ Elevator Pitch
Focus on Writing Style+Conventions and affordances+constraints
Use of Textual Evidence from scholarly journal articles
Use of Keywords
Analysis
Organization/Structure
Lower/Later-Order Concerns: Correct citations, sentence-level Clarity, Mechanics, and Flow
Other Comments

An elevator pitch is a persuasive speech to make your organization or idea sound as interesting as possible. It is usually a 20-30 second speech to convince someone of their product or their company. It is primarily used to make a good first impression.

Elevator Pitch Examples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrIfes1L7NI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH0Thez9gvA

                                                                                            

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRGxPEFRAyY

Strengths and Struggles of:

Elevator Pitch #1:

The one strength of this pitch was that the actor, Vince Vaughn, had confidence while doing his elevator pitch, although it wasn't done in a very professional manner. He started out by talking about how electrical cars are gay. This is a hooked introduction, but might not appeal to all sales managers.

Elevator Pitch #2

The woman in the video did convey confidence, which is something that many people do not have, but in reality, she didn’t talk about herself as much as she should have. An elevator pitch is where you build your credibility in the fastest way possible, along with proposing your idea to a potential employer. The man in the video was asking her questions including to tell him more about herself when she should be doing this without being asked. Although this wasn’t what I find an amazing elevator pitch, it was the best of the three.

Elevator Pitch #3

This pitch was the worst out of the 3. It's called “Bad Elevator Pitch” for a reason. The girl in the video didn’t explain specifically why she wanted to work for the employer, and she stumbled in her words. The first thing you want to do in an elevator pitch is give contact information to your potential employer, so they won’t forget about you. The girl in the video forgot to give her contact information to the man.

PB2B Scholarly Journals

Part 1:

First Article: Gil-Hernandez, S., Mateos, P., Porras, M., Garcia-Gomez, R., Navarro, E., Garcia-Moreno, L “Alcohol Binge Drinking and Executive Functioning during Adolescent Brain Development” frontiers in psychology Front. Psychol., 04 October 2017

Second Article: A.P. Walther, Christine; L. Pedersen, Sarah Cheong, JeeWon & S. G. Molina, Brooke (2017) “The Role of Alcohol Expectancies in the Associations Between Close Friend, Typical College Student, and Personal Alcohol Use”, Substance Use & Misuse, 52:12, 1656-1666

Part 2:

Each of these scholarly journal articles have many of the same concepts. The main argument of the first journal article was that the consumption of alcohol of adolescents has negative effects on neurocognitive alterations, as well as social and academic life. Their study involves the assessment of performance on executive functioning tasks of teenagers according to their pattern of alcohol consumption. Although the second journal article covers the same topic, researchers study the amount of alcohol consumption in a different way. The main argument of the second journal article is the research of close friend drinking being more associated with alcohol use than perceptions of typical college student drinking. For research methods, they both used surveys and questionnaires to see if their hypotheses were true to the results.

Part 3:

Citation for Journal Article #1: Gil-Hernandez, S., Mateos, P., Porras, M., Garcia-Gomez, R., Navarro, E., Garcia-Moreno, L “Alcohol Binge Drinking and Executive Functioning during Adolescent Brain Development” frontiers in psychology Front. Psychol., 04 October 2017

Keywords: adolescence, alcohol, binge drinking, executive functioning, history of consumption, college students, psychology, social drinking

Conventions:  Jargon, data from surveys, other scholarly article sources

Affordances:  Headings for each topic discussed, linked citations, factual evidence for data shown, statistical analysis, references, strong claim, control subjects used

Rhetorical features?: Jargon, Logos, ethos

Writing style:  Scholarly, professional

Organization/Structure: Abstract, Introduction, 4 different headings

Intended/primary audience: Scholars studying psychology and what causes the influence of alcohol consumption among adolescents

Peripheral/secondary audience(s): Other psychologists using this data to compare to their tests

Research methods: Surveys of college students, sources of scholarly articles

Scholar’s argument: “We hypothesize that BD (binge drinking) adolescents will perform worse than non-BD subjects in tasks that evaluate executive functions, and these differences will increase depending on how long they have been consuming alcohol.”

Citation for Article #2:

A.P. Walther, Christine; L. Pedersen, Sarah Cheong, JeeWon & S. G. Molina, Brooke (2017) “The Role of Alcohol Expectancies in the Associations Between Close Friend, Typical College Student, and Personal Alcohol Use”, Substance Use & Misuse, 52:12, 1656-1666

 Keywords:  Alcohol expectancies, alcohol use, consequences of alcohol use, college students, perceived peer alcohol use, psychology, social drinking

Conventions:  Jargon, data from surveys, other scholarly article sources, survey questionnaires

Affordances:  Headings for each topic discussed, scholarly journal sources, factual evidence for data shown, references, strong claim, descriptive statistics

Rhetorical features?: Jargon, Logos

Writing style:  Scholarly, analytical

Organization/Structure: Abstract, method used, results, discussion, references

Intended/primary audience: Scholars studying psychology and what causes the influence of alcohol consumption among adolescents

Peripheral/secondary audience(s): Other psychologists studying close friend drinking and comparing it to typical recreational/social drinking of college students.

Research methods: Anonymous surveys of college students, sources of scholarly articles

Scholar’s argument: “the first aim said perceptions of close friend drinking (are) more strongly associated with alcohol expediencies, alcohol use, and consequences of alcohol use than perceptions of typical college student drinking. The second aim focused on which alcohol expectancy domains partially accounted for the association between close friend drinking, typical college student drinking, and alcohol use and consequences. 

The most important part of these scholarly journals were where they were getting their information from. Besides the surveys and tests that were created by themselves, the researches needed to find evidence outside of their own findings. It’s important to have scholarly articles supporting your results, so you can support your claim. This is what creates ethos (credibility) for the scholarly journal researchers.

PB2a: 3, 4 & 5

PB2A: Parts 3, 4, & 5

Research Questions:

1.     What might cause college students to have “risky behaviors?”

2.     Why do people create self-perceptions and what do they come from?

3.     What is a common thinking process college students have when making decisions?

Search Terms:

1.     Psychology

2.     Risky Behaviors

3.     Social/recreational drinking

4.     College students

5.     Self-perceptions

6.     Social Media

7.     Personality factors

8.     Thinking processes

9.     Influencing factors

1.  Internal factors

Sources:

De Leo, Joseph & Wulfert, Edelgard “Problematic Internet Use and Other Risky Behaviors in College Students: An Application of Problem-Behavior Theory” Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 2013, Vol. 27, No. 1, 133–141

A.P. Walther, Christine; L. Pedersen, Sarah Cheong, JeeWon & S. G. Molina, Brooke (2017) “The Role of Alcohol Expectancies in the Associations Between Close Friend, Typical College Student, and Personal Alcohol Use”, Substance Use & Misuse, 52:12, 1656-1666,

Korn, Liat & Bonny Noach, Hagit (2017) “Gender Differences in Deviance and Health Risk Behaviors Among-Young Adults Undergraduate Students” Substance Use and Misuse

Leveto, J.A. Curr Psychol (2018). “Exploring the Relationships Between Discrepancies in Perceptions of Emotional Performance Among College Students on Self-Esteem and Psychological Distress” Current Psychology

Gil-Hernandez, S., Mateos, P., Porras, M., Garcia-Gomez, R., Navarro, E., Garcia-Moreno, L “Alcohol Binge Drinking and Executive Functioning during Adolescent Brain Development” frontiers in psychology Front. Psychol., 04 October 2017

PB2A

Psychology

Fran Sessa has a PhD in clinical psychology, and a bachelor’s degree in psychobiology. Her teaching interests include abnormal psychology, theories of personality, and the introduction to clinical psychology.

Interesting concepts and research interests include:

• ·        Happiness and the self: the role of realistic and unrealistic control beliefs
• ·        Self-reported adulthood
• ·        Mental illness stigma
• ·        Healthy and risky behaviors in the transition to adulthood
• ·        Self-perceptions of adulthood among college students
• ·        The framing of decisions among college students
• ·        Development of psychosocial maturity among developing adults
• ·        Along with an influence of stigma and culture, expressions of psychopathology
• ·        Personality factors relating to mental health/risky behaviors of college students

Healthy and risky behaviors during the transition to adulthood is the most interesting to me because college students are at that point of transitioning from high school teenagers to actual adults who are on their own. There is lot of “growing up” that happens in college and choices that are made solely on your own as a college student. I think I would like to study why college students make the choices that they do and if they know what the right and wrong things are in certain situations. I think people at the college level know the difference between right from wrong, but I want to study what makes them choose and what factors go into their decision-making process. I’m curious to find out if its primarily their environment that influences them, internal factors, or a combination of both.