Chloe Alexander is a rising fourth-year student majoring in psychology and human resources and labor relations. She is currently a research assistant in the Broad College of Business Kesseler Team Leadership Lab, working with Dorothy Carter, associate professor of management.

NASA was the last organization I expected to be doing research for as a psychology major. If anything, you’d think their projects would be reserved for the engineers. When I started working with Dorothy Carter my freshman year, one of the first things I learned was how applicable industrial organizational psychology is to understanding how organizations work. What started as an unanticipated opportunity turned into a defining experience that shaped how I view both psychology and my future career.

Industrial organizational, or I/O, psychology helps us understand human behavior in the workplace. Specifically, with Carter in the Broad College of Business Kesseler Team Leadership Lab, we study team dynamics and how this impacts organizations. The ability for teams to work together effectively is critical to the success of any organization.

In the fall of my sophomore year, Carter invited me to help with data collection for a research project with NASA. I was immediately interested in learning more about how I/O psychology would be useful to NASA and space travel in general. The project is focused on simulating the issues between teams and communication delay on long haul trips, such as to Mars.

Carter’s team had already built an online interface to assist with data collection. The interface allows a simulation activity between participants in a pod at NASA’s headquarters in Texas and participants at MSU. The research focused on the interaction of multiteam systems, where people from different backgrounds have to learn how to communicate their different specialties with peers who may or may not have the same skill sets or backgrounds. The activity involved solving a hypothetical issue on Mars, with the one catch of the communication delay. While participating here at MSU and communicating with the NASA participants in Texas, we ran the simulation activity with a number of different time delays. The goal was to assess the difference in communication and teamwork outcomes with these varied delays as the independent variable.

This experience as a participant provided a front-row view into the inner workings of the I/O psychology research process. Throughout my time working with Carter in the Teams Lab, I have worked on a number of different projects, including a project with the Army Research Institute that studied the physical challenges that Army teams face in the field. More specifically, the project analyzed how participants engaged in a series of tasks to help army leaders analyze team effectiveness, as well as studying gender differences in the perception of leadership in teams. I even had the opportunity to present the findings at the University Undergraduate Research Forum this year.

All these experiences have helped to shape my desire to work in I/O psychology and leadership development — and they have even inspired me to add an additional major in human resources and labor relations. When I started in Carter’s lab, I had no idea that I would find my future career path. I had never thought of pursuing this field, but I’m thankful for this path. This summer, I will be working at an internship with Wipfli, an accounting firm in Chicago, where I hope to gain experience in organizational performance consulting. Moving forward, I am excited to continue and build on the skills I have learned and apply them to my future career.