Ziqi Yao (‘23) studied psychological sciences and is now the joint lab manager for Dr. Franki Kung’s and Dr. Nathan Cheek’s labs. She used her undergraduate research experience to continue her passion for research in a full-time research role at Purdue. Ziqi shared that she wouldn’t have been able to “make the research progress I had if it wasn’t for my undergraduate research experience.”

Ziqi began her undergraduate research in industrial-organized psychology with Dr. Franki Kung, assistant professor in the psychological sciences department. Her research mainly focused on the lay perception of organizations’ performance-diversity goal relations. She proposed that lay people can have two different beliefs about the nature of the conflict between diversity and the performance goals in an organization. The two beliefs Ziqi researched were inherent conflict belief and resource conflict belief. 

• Inherent conflict belief suggests that two goals are incompatible as they represent different values or meanings.
• Resource conflict belief suggests that two goals compete for limited resources, such as time and money.

The results showed that people vary in the two beliefs and there is a differentiation between the two. Additionally, her study demonstrated that inherent conflict belief predicts negative attitudes toward promoting diversity in organizations over resource conflict. 

When she first started, Ziqi had obstacles she worked to overcome, such as a need for statistical software experience. Without a strong statistical background, her mentors, Dr. Kung and Rick Yang, supported her in quickly learning how to use the software to analyze her data and guided her in developing research skills such as data analysis and determining potential career paths. 

 “Never be afraid to know that you don’t know about something, because you are getting close to an answer by asking questions and potentially discovering the answer in research!”

Ziqi Yao

Ziqi leveraged her research experience to continue her journey at Purdue as a lab manager for the Conflict and Mindset Collaboratory (CMC), and CHoice, Inequality, and Policies (CHIP) labs. “In many ways, my undergraduate research paved the literal way to my current job,” she said. As the lab manager, she mentors other students just like she was mentored. 

While discussing her engagement with past undergraduate research conferences, she shared this was her favorite part of the research process. Presenting her work inspired her to think more critically about her research topic and why we should care about the lay perception of organizations’ performance-diversity goal relations to help Purdue work better as a community. “In this way, communicating research reminds me of the reason I am passionate about my research in the first place,” she shared.