Lucy Scott is a 3rd year Computational Media major studying how service workers use online communities with Dr. Amy Bruckman 

How long have you been an undergraduate researcher at Georgia Tech?

I’ve been an undergraduate researcher at Tech for just about two years now! I started March of my freshman year with the Bruckman Lab and it’s been history since.

How did you get involved with undergraduate research?

I was lucky to have Dr. Bruckman as my Computing and Ethics (CS3001) professor and I was really interested in some of the work she’d mentioned that her lab had done. I reached out to her to discuss one of her papers and she invited me to join a lab meeting to talk more – and it was just coincidence that I had been working at Starbucks the previous semester, which a PhD student in her lab wanted to do research on. I just happened to be the perfect subject-matter expert for this paper, so I joined to help work on that project.

What are you working on?

What I’m currently working on is two-fold:

I'm R&Ring (revising and resubmitting) the aforementioned Starbucks paper, which studied how baristas self-managed issues within the workplace and were forced to act as communication brokers to do their job. We did qualitative coding to understand how these employees used online communities like Reddit to discuss their work, and then we got to actually do interviews with some of these employees! We found that the extra emotional labor associated with being forced to create separate communication networks could be ameliorated with a single-stop, non-corporate platform for these employees to discuss work.

I’m also currently working on my undergraduate thesis – which aims to quantitatively analyze how negatively different low-wage workers discuss their work. There’s a subset of NLP (natural language processing) methods called sentiment analysis methods, which allow us to see the main sentiments being discussed as well as quantify the amount of negativity on any given subreddit. This research was inspired by how Forbes and Fortune release these lists every year about the ‘best places to work’, and some of the most negative subreddits I’ve visited for other research appear on these lists, which made me and my lab want to answer the question – how can others best understand the actual day to day work experience of somebody employed at a supposed ‘top place to work?”. It’s been really interesting thus far, and I’m definitely grateful my research allows me to help service workers because I once was one!

What is your favorite thing about research/researching?

My favorite thing about research is definitely knowing that I'm having a real-world impact on an often very overlooked group within research, low-wage workers. Having worked many-a food service or retail jobs before and throughout college, I know exactly how difficult that work is, and how much sustained labor research could help better the low-wage workforce. I think also getting to apply things I’ve learned in class to what I research has been really valuable. Getting a hands-on application of Python for ML, data structures, and even ethical considerations has made my learning at GT just that much more engaging.

What are your future plans and how has research influenced them?

Right now, I’m constantly waffling between going to industry after graduation and staying around for my Masters (either in analytics or HCI). I go through continuous cycles of wanting a master's and wanting to work, so it will be a flip of a coin to see which one I choose by the time I graduate. In industry, I’m really interested in user experience design and analytics, which my research has definitely influenced. Being an HCI researcher for all my time at college has prepared me for always considering the human-side first, as that’s far more interesting (and unpredictable!) than plain coding to me. As for the master’s, the main draw of course for doing it would be getting to continue my research even further. It will really depend on the future work I want my thesis to relate to!