ISM students are developing their final products for Final Presentation Night, and senior Meghana Rao is utilizing her peers to conduct a sleep study as apart of her research in clinical psychology. The sleep study is a small resemblance of what professional clinical psychologists do with patients that are tested for insomnia or other sleeping issues.

“The students attend two meetings,” Rao said. “The first one they fill out a demographics form and basic sleep form for analysis of participation in the study. They get their sleep tracker and track their sleep for a week. They come back for a second meeting where they get the second tracker and sit through a brief workshop. In this, they learn easy sleep hygiene techniques to implement for the next week. After this they just turn that tracker back in to me.”

The sleep study is used to determine the sleeping patterns in students and how implementing small changes can impact their sleep. Rao feels confident in using students for her study because of the lack of sleep that students typically receive.

“I anticipate that it’ll go smoothly because it’s definitely a simplified version of a normal sleep study,” Rao said. “My only concern is that there’s a lot of paperwork and high schoolers aren’t really good about keeping up with that but I’m still interested to see the results!”