1. Lorelle Moses
Personal Statement
September 25, 2016
Ever since I was a little girl I always had the intrinsic motivation to want to help people. I
would want to make someone’s day better by drawing them a picture or help out my
grandmother in the kitchen whenever I could. I always sought out to be a part of something
larger than myself, a characteristic I thank my father for instilling in me. My love for helping
others carried over into my high school years as I found Service Learning and Teacher Cadets at
Mauldin High School. These programs allowed me to volunteer for numerous programs such as
Big Brother Big Sister and assistant teaching at a local elementary school. Being a part of
programs such as these enhanced my life by letting me to be a part of something bigger than
myself and deepened my love for working with others.
When choosing a major at Clemson University I struggled at first finding out exactly
what I wanted to do. In the beginning I chose Elementary Education, until my freshman year
when I took my first psychology class and fell in love with it. Psychology encompassed a wider
range of interests to me than teaching did. For me, much of my school career has been spent
struggling with math, however, with statistics I found I truly understood how it worked. I finally
felt like I had found my niche. By combining my love for psychology and statistics, I discovered
I wanted to pursue a career in Industrial Organizational Psychology.
Since then I have completed a year on a Creative Inquiry team at Clemson studying the
effects of teamwork, monitoring, and backup behaviors on effectiveness. I have thoroughly
enjoyed getting to be a part of the entire research process from editing the script to figuring out

2. the possible problems we might encounter while running the experiment, and being a part of
running trials themselves. I feel like this experience has given me an insight to what being part of
a graduate program would be like and helped me figure out more what I might be interested in
researching. This involvement has also led me to present my own research question at the SEPA
Conference in Atlanta in 2016. Additionally, in my undergraduate degree I have completed five
statistics courses, some even in addition to the requirements to further my knowledge of the
concepts. I have also created two experiments, and collected and analyzed the data on my own. I
feel like these opportunities have helped to shape my research interests and have allowed me to
gain valuable research experience as well.
Professionally I have also had experience in the restaurant industry, specifically working
at Panera Bread Company. While employed there, I was an associate trainer and responsible for
training new employees in several different areas of the store and was in charge of making sure
the employees I worked with worked up to Panera’s standard. I felt like this experience enriched
my knowledge of a company’s training process and the steps behind the training. It allowed me
to see the different types of training used from online to hands on and I got to see which worked
better and how the employees responded to the programs. This experience also helped me to
choose specifically what I would like to research in graduate school. I enjoy being part of the
training process and would like to further learn how the process works and be a part of making a
company run better statistically. I would also like to further research team behaviors and how to
make teams run more effectively. I see myself having a career with a company that would allow
me to use statistics on a daily basis to help them run more efficiently. I believe my firsthand
experience would be beneficial to a company and that my knowledge would further grow in a
graduate program.