McNair Student Spotlight

Winter 2013 Student Spotlight: Emily Perdue

Emily Perdue is a senior political science and sociology major who will be graduating in May 2013 and will be doing an internship during a year she is taking off before applying to graduate programs. Emily has undertaken a variety of different research projects while at NMU, including working with Dr. Tim Hilton while completing her McNair researching during the summer of 2012, and recently saw her work published.

Thoughts on the McNair Program: “McNair has helped me to achieve a level of education, experience, and success that I never could have imagined.  My years at Northern could not have been more fruitful, or more rewarding- and McNair has been a huge part of that.  I am forever grateful to this program.  I love and respect research, and McNair has given me so many opportunities to develop the skills, to build the strong foundation, that I will need for graduate-level training in research and teaching.  McNair is the reason I'll be ready to walk that path, to actively engage in that process."

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tim Hilton

McNair Research Project:  "My current McNair research is an exploratory look at the relationship between poverty and client involvement in the child welfare system, particularly with regard to cases of alleged or substantiated physical neglect (because that specific type of case seems to be most closely connected to circumstances of poverty.  I'm conducting in-depth interviews with both workers and clients of the child welfare system. We're examining how these people conceive of poverty and client involvement, what they think about the relation between the two, if they think there is one, and we're getting some really diverse and helpful responses.  I think it's an important exploration to make, and it's been an incredibly fascinating and worthwhile experience."

Previous Student Spotlights