09-29-2026
When I first started looking for opportunities at Purdue, undergraduate research wasn’t part of my long-term plan. During my freshman and sophomore years, I was trying to get a taste of different things, figuring out what interested me and finding ways to build experience. Before becoming an undergraduate research assistant, I also spent time as a teaching assistant
I grew up around family members with different experiences in higher education, including some who had backgrounds in research. Seeing how those paths unfolded made me curious about what research would look like for myself.
That curiosity eventually drove me to explore opportunities through the Purdue University Research Center in Economics’ Undergraduate Research Assistantship (UGRA) program, where I connected with Professor Jilian Carr. Working with her not only shaped the way I think about economic research, but also how I approach uncertainty.
Have an intrinsic motivation for whatever you are doing.
Myself at a Muslim Student Association fundraising banquet for Palestine and Sudan
For the past two years, I’ve worked with Professor Carr on research examining the relationship between access to free and reduced-price school lunches and crime rates.
It’s a compelling question with real-world implications. But addressing a question of such scale requires patience and baby steps. A lot of my work involved discerning the process into smaller pictures, monitoring exam rates based on specific geographical boundaries around the school, and cross comparing results to draw a credible conclusion.
Working with data can be tedious. You can spend hours going through information, checking details and making sure everything lines up. Sometimes, the progress you make can feel incredibly small. With time, I learned to appreciate the unglamorous part of research work.
Months of repetitive data work, uncertainty and mistakes are all part of producing research that can ultimately weigh in the real world.
This became one of the most important lessons of my research experience, where meaningful results aren’t always built through one breakthrough moment. Often, they come from consistent effort over a long period of time.
When I first started college, I assumed that being on the right track meant knowing what you were doing. But research made me a lot more comfortable with not having everything figured out. You can start with a hypothesis without knowing where it will lead. You can spend hours working through one approach, only to realize you have to start all over again.
A cardboard cut-out picture frame headshot by Salt on campus on my way to my first day of class in Fall 2024.
Over time, I became more comfortable working through uncertainty. I realized that not having the answer doesn’t mean you’re stuck. Sometimes, it’s what pushes you to ask better questions and open more doors.
I think it made me more confident not knowing everything.
Among my other involvements on campus, research has given me a particularly valuable opportunity to slow down and understand how knowledge gets built.
The technical skills matter, but so do patience, problem-solving, and the willingness to keep going when an answer isn’t presented right away.
For students considering research opportunities, my advice is not to let a lack of experience hold you back. What matters the most is being curious and having an intrinsic motivation for the work you choose to pursue. Research is a work in progress, and so are we.
Hussein Sulub is from Evansville, Indiana. He graduated from Purdue with a Bachelor of Science in economics in May 2026 and took a position at Secretariat. For his research, he worked with Professor Jilian Carr for two years, examining the relationship between free and reduced-price school lunches and crime. His work focused on helping build a comprehensive dataset for the ongoing project. On campus, Sulub also participated in the Federal Reserve Challenge through the economics department and was involved in the Muslim Student Association.
