Personal projects

On Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. the only television show that I watch airs: Survivor.

I’ve watched almost every season of Survivor since the ninth season. I love the strategy, the challenges, the personal stories. It’s a great reality TV show. I’ve had lots of favorite players of the years — and I always get excited when some of them come back for a returning players season. I loved watching players like Jeremy come back for a second time and win — or Tony coming back and playing a second time and fizzling out even after extraordinarily winning. Now season 40 is airing, and the theme is “all winners” — Winners at War. I couldn’t be more excited to see some of my favorite players again, including some that I haven’t seen play since I was in elementary school.

Every Computational Science major at Stevens has to take two semesters of senior research and complete a research project. Originally, I planned to do a project predicting voting outcomes in national elections similar to 538. Then, I found someone’s master’s thesis on predicting the winner of Survivor based upon a variety of “arbitrary” variables. I wanted to do something a bit more defined. Survivor was their academic project, so why couldn’t it be mine?

At its core, Survivor is a social game. At the end of each episode, or “round,” each player casts a vote to eliminate another player. The player with the most votes for them is typically eliminated. At the end, the players eliminated pick one of the remaining players to win the game.

I wanted to test a theory that individuals need to have the right connections in order to win the game. Could examining the connections created by voting for the same person be an indicator of who is the most likely to win the million dollar prize?

While my project had some hiccups initially (as the senior research program is not fully fleshed out within the Math Department; the lack of focus on science departments in the school is an entirely different topic), I am happy that I was able to work on a project that integrates my personal and academic interests. While I haven’t been able to find a definite conclusion yet, I’m much more motivated to keep chugging along on a project that combines my interests with my schoolwork.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been able to integrate my interests into schoolwork; for example, last year I worked on a project predicting the nationality of soccer players. While Stevens is the best for finding a career, which is the focus of many students, that does not mean you should not try to have more fun doing your academic work.