2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas

Turn inspirations into your passion project.

This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

People working on laptops
Psychology

Writing an Op-Ed

An Op-Ed is a personal article that serves as powerful tool for advocating, persuading, and bringing attention to an issue. When done well, it can be the spark that a topic needs to gain national or international attention. In this project, you'll write your own persuasive op-ed on a topic of your choice! You'll gain skills of observing the social climate, researching the topic, and writing creatively and authentically.

Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Medicine

Adeoluwa
Adeoluwa

How does culture and family play a role in the way you relate to others?

Why do you relate to your friends, romantic partners, and family the way that you do? For this project, you'll collect data from your parents/guardians, siblings, partners, and friends based on psychological frameworks in culture, parenting, and familial relationships. You'll conduct a literature review and write a paper (and maybe even develop a theory!) about how your cultural values, your parent's relationships, and your family dynamics have played a role in the way that you relate to others.

Psychology, Social Science

Vicky
Vicky

Communicate Science

In this project, you will harness the power of creativity to translate complex scientific concepts into engaging and understandable content. Choose your medium—be it a snappy video, an insightful podcast, or an informative newsletter—and embark on a journey to refine your storytelling abilities, making science accessible and captivating to a wider audience. This exercise is not just about simplifying science but about enhancing your skills in critical thinking, creativity, and effective communication, essential tools for any future career. By distilling intricate ideas into relatable narratives, you will not only contribute to demystifying science for the public but also develop a versatile skill set that transcends academic disciplines. This project offers a unique platform to showcase your ability to engage with scientific topics creatively and make a meaningful impact on how science is perceived and understood.

Neuroscience, Psychology, Social Science

Emily
Emily

Ice or heat for an injury or pain?

In this project you will write a scientific review article critically analyzing research that supports use of either ice or heat for injuries or pain. It will allow you to explore indications for ice or heat, as well as whether the research suggests they are helpful or hindering for healing and pain reduction. This will help you gain skills in accessing and assessing current research in this area of treatment, and also build your skills in writing a review paper. This project could easily be turned into a podcast if you wanted to explore that avenue too!

Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology

Ellen
Ellen

Write a Review Article With Your Topic of Choice

The goal of this project is to write a review article of a topic you choose by reading and summarizing primary literature. By letting your interests guide your project, it can really take any form you want and will develop organically. These types of projects are important to help grow a fundamental understanding of your topic of choice, but also be a useful resource for others who want a thoughtful synopsis from an expert in the field.

Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Chemistry

Andrew
Andrew

Liability in Autonomous Technology

With the rise of autonomous technology in telecommunications, vehicles, and even weapon systems, how is liability to be issued in cases of AI-related harm? This project looks at the the main legal concepts of liability and applies these concepts to the actions of artificial intelligence.

Psychology, History, Literature

Rachael
Rachael

Virtual Meeting Fatigue, Social Equity, and Avatars

[This study is part of an actual project being funded by the National Science Foundation] The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of remote work, highlighting barriers to well-being, equity, and inclusion. Virtual meeting fatigue, the exhaustion that occurs after long periods of videoconferencing, has been identified as especially harmful to women and people of color, compounding common face-to-face inequities like unequal talking time and interruptions in meetings. To develop more inclusive and equitable remote workspaces, this research asks: How can future virtual meeting platforms better support well-being and social equity? To address this question, the project aims to identify general best practices for virtual meetings among diverse teams to minimize fatigue and improve well-being, equity, and inclusion. You will conduct a survey with remote workers to examine how virtual meeting features correlate with user welfare, comparing results by gender, race and age to determine whether certain populations are more susceptible to virtual meeting fatigue. You will also examine the potential use of avatars as a means of reducing negative self-focus, which previous reseach suggests is a major contributor to zoom fatigue.

Social, Psychology, Social Science

Rabindra (Robby)
Rabindra (Robby)

Stigma and Stereotypes in Media

Television shows and movies often depict people with certain identities in stigmatizing or stereotypical ways. In order to find out more about how this looks and how common it is, you could conduct a content analysis, documenting and describing these depictions in a TV show or a movie.

Psychology

Jordan
Jordan

Social Isolation as a Contributor of Depression Among Alzheimer's Patients

Many individuals who are diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease also experience symptoms of depression. People with memory decline also tend to reduce social interaction as these memory issues contribute to interpersonal difficulties. Organziations like ADDI provide access to open-source databases data related to Alzheimer's. One way to analyze these data could be to look at the relationship of social isolation as it related to depression symptoms among these patients.

Psychology, Social Science, Cognitive, Statistics

Elizabeth
Elizabeth

The Persuasive Potential of Message Framing, Temporal Orientation, and Self-Affirmation in Anti-Vaping Campaigns

This is a project I am currently working on that aims to better understand what aspects of anti-vaping messages are most persuasive. Additionally, the project looks to establish how successful certain messages might be in changing attitudes and behaviors among individuals who use e-cigarettes.

Social, Psychology, Quantitative, Social Science, Public Health

Carolyn
Carolyn

Gut-brain axis in the development of depression

This project will focus on investigating the different pathways in which the gut and the brain are constantly interacting and how this communication is impaired in the context of major depressive disorder.

Neuroscience, Psychology, Social Science

Nashali
Nashali

Emotion Regulation in Relationships

How people manage their emotions (i.e., their ability to self-regulate) contributes not only to their own happiness, but also to the success of their relationships, including romantic and platonic. Explore the academic literature on emotion regulation in relationships: What strategies are most beneficial? Is it more advantageous to focus on positive or negative emotions? Which dimensions of relationships (e.g., trust, self-discloure, closeness) are most influenced by emotion regulation? Your final product could be a scientific literature review, blogpost, or podcast!

Psychology, Social Science, Public Health

Jacquelyn
Jacquelyn

You are What You Eat

Interested in helping others feel better? Well, you are what you eat. Many nutritional changes/deficiencies can drastically impact your mental health and affect diagnoses. This project could include educational content/series for your community or class with local grocery store about how to read labels and know what they consume and how it can affect their mental health.

Psychiatry, Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology

Kia
Kia

Mixing Methods: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Knowledge Production

Each academic discipline has different methods of conducting research - for STEM and the social sciences, this usually means designing an experiment which is then replicated in a lab or a clinic. For the humanities, this may look like exploring the archives for primary sources or translating a text from one language into another. Each of these methods have different strengths. We can look at an article, essay, or experiment you find fascinating and figure out what that scholar actually did in the process of creating it. For example, if it was a social sciences experiment, how did they find participants? Did they use a longitudinal or between-subjects design? From there, we can talk about the flaws in the study - scholars tend not to agree on much, but one point of consensus is that there's no such thing as a perfect experiment. One of the most fruitful parts of research design is thinking through the ways it can be more simple, thorough, or truthful. Maybe a study on human cognition could have been more encompassing if it had drawn from the knowledge of a community that has historically been excluded from science. Perhaps an essay about the power of poetry could have benefitted from an empirical study of how words evoke emotional responses. Together, we can explore different approaches to knowledge production, learn from their methods, and come up with a project of our own!

Psychology

Emily
Emily

8 legs are better than 2!

The octopus is one of my favorite animals- not just because they're crazy smart but because they're amazing movers! 70% of neurons in the octopus are located in their arms, which control their movement, the texture of their skin, the color of their camouflage, and each individual sucker. On top of that, they can detect color and taste through their skin! In this project, you'll learn about the motor and chromatophore systems of these amazing creatures along with their unique behaviors for camouflage. Along the way, you'll learn the core principles of how neurons communicate and produce behavior.

Neuroscience, Psychology, AI/ML

Abby
Abby

Write a Review Paper

In this project, you will write an academic paper reviewing the latest research on a topic of your choice within the field of psychology and/or neuroscience. By engaging deeply with the literature, you will hone your skills in critical thinking, learn to evaluate the strength of scientific evidence, and develop the ability to synthesize complex information into a coherent narrative. This process will also enhance your academic writing skills, teaching you how to construct well-founded arguments and articulate them effectively. Further, I encourage you to cultivate your research interests by picking a topic you are passionate about, which might guiding future academic pursuits or career paths. Possible topics include: - The influence of social connectedness on adolescents’ emotion following social isolation - The impact of video games on adolescent wellbeing - Impact of early life adversity on memory in adolescents

Neuroscience, Psychology, Social Science

Emily
Emily

Creating a Survey

In this project, you will create your own survey to collect data on a topic of your interest. An example topic could be examining the relationship between stress and listening to music or memory and music. This project will give you experience with one method of data collection as well as how to analyze the responses collected. The overall goal of this project is to practice formulating research questions and to become familiar with survey design.

Psychology, Cognitive

Alexandria
Alexandria

Correlates of Toxicity in Video Games: Are Avatars a Solution?

Toxicity in online gaming is a serious problem, causing significant detriments to well-being, especially for female players. This research will build on Dr. Ratan's research on this topic (see his Op-Ed in Wired here: https://www.wired.com/story/toxicity-in-gaming-is-dangerous-heres-how-to-stand-up-to-it/) to examine whether avatar customization orientations might help address this issue. You will conduct a survey to examine how often people are exposed to toxicity depending on the types of online games they play. You will test hypotheses that toxicity exposure is correlated with measures of well-being, loneliness, and depression. You will also compare these correlations by gender, race, age, and other demographics. Finally, you will identify whether certain approaches to avatar customization that people report (e.g., choosing to represent themselves more or less idealistically) are related to more or less harmful effects of toxicity exposure.

Social, Psychology, Social Science

Rabindra (Robby)
Rabindra (Robby)

Fetishization in inter-ethnic and inter-racial relationships

We will interview a diverse group of people who have been fetishized by current or past partners about their experience with this phenomenon to create a narrative project. This project will include photos (or illustrations), sound bytes from the interviews, and quotations. It will live on social media where we will start with introducing the project and summarizing the findings before sharing pieces of the interviews. We seek not only to document what people are experiencing and how they think others can do better, but also to share this information widely so that (1) people can feel validated in their experiences and (2) so solutions can be shared broadly.

Psychology, Literature, Business

Yael
Yael

Review Paper

A review paper is a great way to become a mini-expert in a subject. I will help you find research papers pertaining to your interest and help you craft a paper that synthesizes the research and provides ideas for future study.

Philosophy, Psychology, Creative Writing

Jacqueline
Jacqueline