Running head: EDGE FINAL REFLECTIONS

EDGE Project: Final Reflection Paper

Conner Motzkus
Southern Utah University

EDGE FINAL REFLECTIONS

The idea for my specific project came from my love for two topics: psychology and yoga.
In my Ethics in Counseling and Psychotherapy course, I learned that yoga was being utilized in
certain residential treatment centers. I did two week internship at one such facility. During my
interactions with the residents, I asked them about their experience with the weekly yoga classes
they hated them. When I dug deeper, however, I found they hated it because the practice of
yoga made them take a long, hard look at themselves. They admitted that, while painful, yoga
was helpful overall. When I became a certified yoga instructor the following summer, I knew
what my project would consist of. I was going to involve the SUU community in a study that
showed the positive effects of yoga.
I first needed to find a professor to sponsor my research. Dr. Grant Corser was excited at
the prospect of researching an area he was unfamiliar with. We spent time together designing the
study, filling out the necessary paperwork to get it approved by the Institutional Review Board
(IRB), and finally, finding participants in the community. Finding those interested in
participating was the most difficult part of the study.
With this project, I wanted to both examine the effects of yoga in a research setting while
introducing SUU students to yoga. I strongly believed that it would have a positive effect in their
lives just like it had in mine. We tested levels of perceived stress, mood awareness, and
mindfulness. Dr. Corser and I hypothesized that we would indeed find that yoga had a positive
influence, but we werent certain what it would have the largest effect on. Through means of
statistical analysis, the results of our study indicated that a short term yoga course is effective in
reducing levels of perceived stress, increasing participants capacity to label their mood states
and in increasing curiosity surrounding internal experiences. Neither of us expected that we
would find statistically significant results in all three areas that we tested. Yoga has been the way
that I work through stress and keep myself healthy, so finding significant results was extremely
validating.
While the significance of the results is exciting, I was just as excited at the feedback that I
received from the participants. Some of the statements I received were: The best thing for me
was your sense of humor, and being cool with everyone doing whatever they could, I learned a
lot about myself. It honestly helped me to deal with my Anxiety and I am going to miss the
weekly sessions, and I thought that the class was very calming. As the instructor of the yoga

EDGE FINAL REFLECTIONS

classes, it warmed my heart to know that I was able to facilitate my fellow students being able to
find some peace.
I applied knowledge from my Statistics in Psychology course a lot in this project. While
the class was not my favorite while I was enrolled in it, I found that when statistics are related to
your own project, they suddenly become interesting. My past experience teaching yoga was also
helpful in the completion of this project. In regards to the rest of the project, I increased my
proficiency in new skills, such as designing research, recruiting participants, writing applications
to the IRB, and designing a research poster.
I believe SUU put an experiential learning requirement in place to help undergraduates
see that the content they are learning in their courses can be applied in real world projects. How
useful is the information learned in a classroom if it cant be used outside the classroom. Without
the EDGE program, the participants in my study would likely not have been introduced to yoga
in an accepting class setting that I established during the study.
The EDGE (Education Designed to Give Experience) program is an opportunity for
students to apply the skills that they have been learning in their college courses. Southern Utah
University largely emphasizes hands on learning that will undoubtedly assist undergraduates as
they work to become valuable members of working society. Those who have done some sort of
service learning project as a part of their college experience have a serious advantage in the job
market. It is one thing to say you have learned about a concept, but it is entirely different when
you have experience applying a concept. Graduates of SUU can accurately say that they applied
concepts from many courses into an independently completed project. As a student who will be
graduating this semester, I am grateful for the opportunity I had to work on an independent
project. I have heard other students frustrated with the new experiential learning requirement, but
I always appreciated Dr. Corsers perspective on the program, EDGE. Its part of education.