UPenn Wharton Research
Diversity and Inclusion
Leadership Alliance Wharton Cohort 2020
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In the summer of 2019, Sandra was one of the four students selected for the Leadership Alliance summer research at the University of Pennsylvania. Under the mentorship of Dr. Andrew Carton and two graduate students (McKenzie Preston and Ariana Beetz), they conducted a project examining the leading rhetorical strategies to promote inclusion within organizations based on social psychology theory. She summarized academic articles on goal commitment, construal level theory, and leadership rhetoric and collected historical examples of leadership speeches used for conflict resolution. This experience helped her grow as a researcher, learning to critically evaluate academic articles to guide the research project. The Leadership Alliance National Symposium (LANS) conference allowed her to work with a communication coach to solidify my oral presentation strengths. As a result, she presented the pilot study at the Leadership Alliance National Symposium and at the Central European Conference on Intelligence Systems (CECIIS) in Croatia.
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How Can Leaders Use Rhetoric to Promote Inclusion? Presented at Leadership Alliance Symposium 2019, Hartford, CT
Intro to How Can Leaders Use Rhetoric to Promote Inclusion? Presented at Leadership Alliance Symposium 2019, Hartford, CT
Attending the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2021
During this summer of 2020, Sandra returned to the University of Pennsylvania to investigate the relationship between socio-economic background and salary negotiation decisions under the mentorship of McKenzie Preston. They aimed to understand how salary presentation affects negotiation performance based on the candidate's social class background, possibly relate to payroll inequalities. In this project, she summarized academic articles, identified the appropriate scales, designed the survey for data collection, and analyzed the results using regressions and processes macro to examine the mediators' and moderators' effect. Although this research demonstrated no significant results among the variables they had sought to investigate, she learned to embrace research ambiguity and understand the important details that data suggest beyond an expected hypothesis. She presented the work at the UCLA McNair Virtual Conference and CECIIS.
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UCF McNair Cohort 2021
Socio-Economic Background and Negotiation Outcomes. 30th Central European Conference on Intelligence Systems 2020.