2020 Projects

By Gabrielle Denny

As Airbnb continues to affect the amount of customers that choose beach resorts and hotels, the unanswered question still remains: What are they doing different that is making them so successful to the point where customers choose Airbnb over beach resorts? This project lays out the reasons for the rise of the Airbnb platform, the opinions of real customers and their preferences, and the ways beach resorts and hotels can alter their environment and personalities to further attract customers. Through surveying, interviews, and research collecting, this project seeks to answer the major questions.

By Trent Ralston

The management styles used by different business most directly affects the employees work ethic in good ways and bad ways. To begin, there are hundreds of different management styles that result in a happy or unhappy employee. This paper will discuss the ways that managers treat their employees and how it most directly results in profits.

By Izzy Saunders

During my work, I plan on looking into the youth brands of fashion companies and how they attract audiences. My mentor, Iva Pawling will be connecting me with those youth brands and I will be gathering data on how they successfully develop an audience. Mostly, this data will be based on surveys from a list of youth companies I will be hand selecting. Collecting data on those will let me determine the successes and failures in fashion companies among the youth. These results could eventually help youth fashion companies around the world with their branding towards their specific audiences, speaking in a language that youth understands, and while also gaining inspiration from these examples and processes. 

By Aun Dabbas

Fashion has been developing and trending massively over the years which makes sense since it is the clothing that keeps one appropriate and protected. The vast industry of fashion made me realize that its importance on every individual is what makes it crucial to improve it in certain ways. I want to democratize fashion and revolutionize the whole procedure of clothing purchases.  My plan is to tackle and improve this field of fashion; by creating an online platform that provides a unique system which enables easier accessibility to purchase desired clothing presented on the platform. I want to make “having good style” an easy task by making fashion choices and outfits more accessible to the ones who believe fashion and style is only possible with high end brands. 

By Luke Teeple

This paper compares and contrasts how businesses grow and develop differently in the US and China. The primary lens will be from a purely economist-based perspective; however, when necessary cultural and political perspectives will be discussed to add background and/or when relevant. The focus of this paper will be on two companies and how these companies have grown and developed differently as a result of the economic systems present in the US and China. This paper will also discuss how these companies are reacting to the trade war.

By grace peterson

Studying the factors that prohibit teacher-student relationships from forming will greatly help educators and students understand what causes these bonds and what good comes from them. It is evident that students excel when they have a professional relationship with a teacher, but there are so many different things that prohibit these relationships to form. Many students say that a teacher-student relationship changes the student’s life forever, so the things that are stopping this must be significant. Researching the running thread between academic success and a friendship with a teacher is something that provides limitless information.

By nathan solomon

While modern American society has suggested to simply throw money at low performing schools, the country’s education system continues to remain in shambles as the educational disparity gap remains. The research conducted attempts to understand if the government's practices of issuing school grants has any effects on student outcomes and performances. The research project shall be carried out with the following strategy: 3 California districts given varying amounts of government-granted funding will be compared. Factors such as socioeconomic status, majority ethnicity, average household income, etc shall be controlled.

By Cole Normandin Parker

The goal is to study where students apply each year, take the data and show the ranking of each college and how many students apply each year from each school. Also, add in common data and different schools to show how there are many schools to apply to, other than for example the UCs and Ivy Leagues. 

By Madi Garwal

In this research paper I will be finding the effects and advantages of having new concussion testing technology on high school athletes. I will be using new concussion diagnosing technology to see if there are advantages to having a non-biased and quicker way to diagnose concussions in high school athletes. I will be trying to find if using this new test that uses eye-tracking effectively diagnoses concussions and if it works better than the current concussion testing and diagnosis process at my high school.

By Clara Becker

Veterinarians are at an increased risk for depression, veterinary offices are similar to an emergency rooms with the constant up and down of incoming patients. This experiment aims to prove that because of the extreme highs and lows of veterinary practices it puts the doctors at a higher risk of depression compared to the average citizen. To prove this the Vets will record how the feel after every visit on a one to five scale and also state the type of visit it was. The data will then prove that vets are at increased risk of depression because of the constant change of the severity of the animals being treated.

By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

This question is important to understanding the rising depression rate among teenagers in the U.S. due to an increase in marketing strategies masked by the usage of mainstream social media. Researching these industries and how they work will contrast the culture between teenagers now vs. those from the 90’s.  So far, there has been an increase of grunge aesthetic in modern teens as well as a high epidemic of drug use and decline in mental health. My research will find the answers as to how powerful the tools of commercialization are on teenagers today, leading to an unanswered question as to how dangerous the industry really is on younger generations.

By Abigail Amish and Julia Henry

Different types of prisons use many types of rehabilitation efforts for their prisoners. For example, private prisons are known for putting prisoners to work for below-minimum wage, and high-security prisons are less likely to have any sort of distinct rehabilitation efforts. Educational efforts and healthy living conditions in prisons have been shown to lower recidivism rates in low-security prisons, but this data could also be attributed to the lesser crimes committed by those prisoners. 

By Angelica Jorio

The research focuses on government operated homeless shelters versus non-profit operated homeless shelter. The city of Laguna Beach has had the first and longest city-run homeless shelter in Orange County, as well as a homeless shelter operated by Friendship Shelter NGO. Other cities in Orange County have shied away from the city or county operated homeless shelters because of high costs of running them. In substitution, cities leave it up to Nonprofits to help alleviate the problem. In some scenarios, non addressing the problem at all, dumbing their homeless in neighbouring cities. My research centers around the two types of homeless shelters, and, as a control, how cities without any type of alternative sleeping location have addressed homelessness. 

By Alex Coulolias

This paper articulates the ways in which the new coming of age virtual reality headsets are helping laborers working in factories or distribution centers are using virtual reality to learn how to operate machines. Through the use of devices such as the Oculus Rift, companies are now able to create a safer and faster work environment for the employees. By having workers train on machine simulations, stimulated through the use of virtual reality, companies are able to train their employees, and keep the cost of doing it low.

By Luke Gold-Sine and Weston Judd

This paper will explore the increasing problem of plastic waste in our oceans. More specifically, the process of how plastics break down in the ocean. Our research will attempt to provide a solution to prevent plastics from breaking down into microplastics. Microplastics should be considered a primary concern as they are harmful to zooplankton -- organisms that are necessary for a healthy food chain. Our research will include a controlled experiment involving plastic bags in several water tanks with various PH, salinity, and UV levels.

By Kian Trengove

I will be experimenting with different kinds of electrokinetic phenomena to see the differences in reliability, fidelity, and feasibility to manipulate different microplastics using electrokinetics. For example, it is known that some microplastics will aggregate with other particles such as sand in the ocean, which can be at least moved using electrophoresis, but not on a large enough scale to be feasibly implementable. The results of this research should also provide insight into the ability of electrokinetics to destroy or detect microplastics. 

By Henry Stewart

For my experiment, I plan on researching the California kelp forests. There are tide pools close to my house, so I have access to kelp that I can work with. I hope to implement an experiment where I record the density of kelp in different environmental factors such as depth, temperature, and sunlight and how it develops depending on where it is. I’ll watch how it grows, seeing where it flourishes and where it struggles to survive. I hope to learn what environment kelp thrives in in Laguna Beach.

In my research I want to learn about submarine propeller cavitation and use that knowledge to apply to altering the way industrial ship propellers make noise. Submarine propellers are known to have much lower cavitation and are made to move quietly. If this technology was applied to the current vessels producing the most noise in our oceans it would make a great impact on reducing noise pollution affecting marine mammals. 

By Jeremy hayes and finn van der baan

Due to climate change, the ocean’s temperatures have been rising at alarming rates, so we want to figure out how these changing temperatures will affect species living in our oceans. For our experiment, we plan on creating a closed system to manipulate ocean temperatures to test the rate at which Brittle sea stars legs regenerate. Our goal is to discover if the sea stars will regenerate limbs faster or slower and what their physical state is after completing the experiment. After discovering our findings, we plan on expanding our thinking into how this would affect brittle Sea Stars in their natural ecosystems and how their loss will affect the ecosystem around it.