Ellena Stumpf, senior economics major, choose to do an experiment that measures if payment has an affect on the effort an individual gives.

She received an USI Endeavor Award for Research and Creativity, which helps with the costs associated with doing research or a creative project: lab work, equipment, materials and travel to research sites.

“I wanted to do an experiment just to learn how to do experiments because I want to be–maybe a professor later on,” Stumpf said. “I’m a person who shows a lot of effort. It doesn’t matter how high the wages are, but I’m just speaking for me, so I wanted to know if that was the case for everyone.”

Stumpf started preparation for this experiment earlier this year. She said because her experiment is still in progress she can’t say a lot about it

“Everything takes a lot of time and effort to do an experiment,” Stumpf said. “It has been fun but also tough because you have to take care of so much.”

Stumpf plans on putting a video together on her finding that will be presented during the Endeavor Awards Symposium on April 10, 2014.

Stumpf said one of the most difficult parts about this project was convincing the university to let her do something like this on campus.

“Nobody has ever done anything like that here with subjects and experiments,” she said. “That is kind of groundbreaking and it took a lot of work to convince people to run this experiment on campus.”

Assistant Professor of Economics Curtis Price is Stumpf’s faculty mentor for her project. Stumpf said Price is known at USI for being the professor who does experiments.

“He has been a guide in this journey,” she said.

There are only about 60 of these labs where Stumpf will conduct her experiment in the United States and about 120 of them in the world.

Price said Stumpf is responsible for almost everything, and he is there to guide her in proper laboratory procedures and to get her to think deeply about the kinds of things she will do in the laboratory.

“What I am there to do help her is help her figure out how to answer the hypotheses she has came up on her own.” he said. “In (Stumpf’s) case, she wanted to do something that involved laboratory methods instead of tradition economic methods, which is what I do.”

Students are selected from all different disciplines to receive grant money.

“People are not aware of what an academic conference is about,” said Jane Johansen, the Endeavor Awards Program director. “They get over there, and they have a wonderful time because sometimes we have music and there have been some really interesting pieces of art on occasion.”

Johansen has one problem with the program.

“This is where people are creating new ideas and new stuff and I don’t think students and faculty pay enough attention to the fact that,” she said. “Right here there is an academic conference that is really high quality with our own students.”