BUA Junior Wins First Place at Harvard Global Health & Leader Conference
BUA junior Aditya Venkatesh ’23 presented a proposal entitled “Learning to Love Learning: A Positive Feedback Loop Approach to Combating Procrastination” at Harvard’s Global Health and Leader Conference on April 23-24 as part of the Community Pitch Competition, in which students research and design a health-related project that they want to implement in their home communities.
Aditya’s pitch, which focused on the topic of procrastinative behaviors in middle- and high-school students, won first place. Aditya hopes to implement research-based methods to combat procrastination, including meditation and mindfulness techniques, in schools and in greater Boston communities at large. The proposal stems from an article Aditya wrote in his freshman year at BUA entitled “Understanding procrastination through action control,” which was a top 50 winner of the Harvard College Undergraduate Research Association (HCURA)’s Brevia Research Writing Competition.
Aditya writes:
“This project is very near and dear to my heart. I started thinking about this project during my freshman year at BUA. I saw a rise in procrastination amongst students during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and I wanted to understand why students procrastinate to their own detriment. Upon researching this extensively, I wrote an article for the Harvard BREVIA magazine . At that time, I had looked at procrastination from a scientific and biological standpoint. In this project, I wanted to continue the work to understand how procrastinative behaviors can be modified.”
Read Aditya’s winning proposal here. Congratulations, Aditya, on this impressive accomplishment; we look forward to finding ways to integrate your work here at BUA!