Author: Ryan Meador         Majors: Finance and Accounting

Working from home to analyze the collected data.

My name is Ryan Meador, and I am currently a senior in the Sam M. Walton College of Business pursuing twin majors in Finance and Accounting, as well as a minor in Legal Studies. Led by the wonderful Associate Professor of Marketing, Dr. Molly Rapert, I have explored how institutions are tackling the issue of information overload in order to communicate effectively with students.

The amount of information that people must process daily is astonishing in the age of “big data”. Employees, students, and customers alike are all responsible for sifting out the useless bits, while attempting to capture important nuggets that may fall through the cracks. My research sought to examine what it takes to establish effective communication channels that create a signal which will penetrate through the noise.

During my tenure at the University of Arkansas I have witnessed the staggering volume of information consumption on campus firsthand, and thus decided to research the topic for my honors thesis. The technological advances in software and internal communication systems have led to no shortage of channels for reaching a target audience. At times, the burden of maintaining a grasp on all the current outlets for correspondence can become overwhelming – at which point the valuable pieces of information become blended with an immaterial whole. As a marketing professor, Dr. Rapert was also interested in the issue as it pertains to reaching existing and potential customers. We decided to work together to explore the topic and seek answers to our respective investigations. For my piece of the research, I identified two main areas to examine. This two-prong approach allowed me to create a holistic view of where schools stand the problem.

For one, I looked at what universities are doing currently and what kind of results they are seeing. As institutions become increasingly competitive, it is imperative for them to be able to effectively communicate differentiators and key offerings for students. After all, what is the point of investing millions in unique course offerings, student activities, structural enhancements, etc. if nobody is aware of them? College students, outside of school, are met with an extraordinary amount of information daily from social outlets and other sources, and it has never been more challenging to capture (and hold) the attention of a generation that is constantly shifting focus from one topic to another.

The second area of exploration is related to how the educational resources currently used prepare students for entering the workforce. Most students that are enrolled in higher education are there with hopes of earning a job following school. Therefore, an inherent focus for schools should be to ensure that their graduates are adequately prepared to transition to their next step smoothly. While it is naïve to believe that all jobs and careers will have a uniform approach to communication, the issue of information overload touches every area of employment. Employers, employees, and customers alike face a daily battle to navigate exorbitant amounts of information which may result in inefficiencies.

While creating the framework for the research, I identified synergies with a fellow honors student, Jonah Rapert. After discussing my initial thoughts, we decided to attack our theses together. For one part of our research, we created an online survey for participants to take part in. These results gave us insights into how students feel about the topic and their personal experiences with the issue. We also jointly developed an internet email audit, which was intended to have contributors examine one-week of their personal behavior with emails. We found the results we collected to be mutually beneficial for our respective theses. Along with this, I worked concurrently on gathering anecdotal data from university employees and outside corporations to develop the rest of my research.

As with everything else this year, COVID posed a hurdle for our project. When college campuses shut down and transitioned fully online, the amount of virtual correspondence naturally increased exponentially. Following the guidance of Dr. Rapert, I decided to alter the timing of the research in an effort to eliminate any bias that results from a COVID-semester may have yielded.

With the help of the Honors College Research Grant, Jonah and I were able to gather a reliable amount of data in an efficient, and “COVID-friendly,” manner. Conducting the research was challenging in the current environment we are all trying to traverse, but by leveraging networks and providing incentives we created a successful mix to overcome it. Ultimately the research topic has been extremely enlightening for me as both a student and soon-to-be young professional. I gained tremendous awareness of best practices as well as some underlying tendencies that various people have in dealing with an overload of information. Within the next six months I will be entering a career that is notorious for an incessant flow of information, so I feel that the work I was able to do with the resources provided by a research grant will prove invaluable as I begin the new chapter in my life.