John Sanders
Outreach
My time spent at Clemson and abroad was made complete by various research projects and service learning opportunities. Below, you will find information on each of these projects and how they influenced my education.
Undergraduate research projects
After taking research methods and epistemology-related coursework at Clemson, my interest in the social sciences began to grow. Over the course of my final three semesters, I participated in two different independent research projects with the department of Sociology at Clemson.
Nonprofit and Foundation Roles in Disaster Recovery in Spartanburg County
Spring 2025
In the Spring semester of 2025, I helped initiate a study of NGO disaster relief following Hurricane Helene. The study involved in-depth interviews with residents of Spartanburg county. During this project, I gained hands-on experience with data collection, navigated IRB review, conducting liturature review, and even drafted a procedure for interviewing Spanish-speaking residents.
Understanding Youth Involvement in Activism and Social Movements
Fall 2025
In the Fall of 2025 I participated in a project to code 35 years of newspaper coverage from 1960 to 1995 for youth activism. The semester included a comprehensive training in data coding, and lessons on reliability, operationalization, and conceptualization. Participating in this project was catalytic in my ability to collaborate with others, as myself and six others had to reach constant agreements in coding.
Service Learning
As a land grant university, Clemson intends to engage its undergraduate students in projects that extend to benefit the greater South Carolina community. I had the opportunity to participate in two of these projects.
Translation of documents for the Department of Agricultural Sciences
Spring 2025
During the Spring semester of 2025, I participated in a project to translate official documents for Clemson's Agricultural Service Laboratory. These documents included forms for agricultural workers to request services such as sample tests and pest identification, and informational documents. This project posed a number of challenges, like working with a non-Spanish-speaking team from the department of Agricultural Sciences, translating highly specific and technical terms and phrases, and negotiating with the formatting and layout design of the documents following translation. By the end of the semester, our team had created a useable product that was implemented on the official website of the Agricultural Services Laboratory of Clemson University. Below are the final translated documents.
Allendale Community Center
Spring 2025
During the Spring semester of 2025, I had the opportunity to participate in a service learning project centered around the development of a community center in Allendale County, South Carolina. In this project, my team was tasked with conducting a needs assessment. To do this, we used various sources of data to evaluate the needs of the community and how these needs may be met with the community center. While working with the team, we learned hands-on how to create outreach in a distant county and adhere to the voices and needs of an underrepresented community.
