2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas
Turn inspirations into your passion project.
This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Cookie Wars: How Lawsuits Shape Firm-Level Evaluations
A possible research project could explore the impact of being sued on small businesses, specifically in the food industry. The study could focus on the example of Crumbl suing Dirty Dough, as well as other similar cases. Using data from Yelp, the study could examine changes in customer ratings and reviews before and after the lawsuit. Additionally, natural language processing techniques could be used to analyze customer comments to understand their perceptions of the company before and after the lawsuit. The study could also investigate any changes in the company's social media presence and overall reputation. By conducting this research, the study could provide insights on how being sued could potentially benefit small businesses by bringing more positive attention to the firm, depending on the audience and their preferences.
Economics, Quantitative, Social Science
Statistic part of religions.
Since I have been growing up in one small country where people with different religions sems to live together. Schools where able to accept different cultures and religions. Inside a small country we have different religions, inside those religions we have different genders and different ages. In those ages we can find what each stage believes more. We can find how many of them are openminded and how many are old mindset. We can ask them to learn how many of them approve to have a relationship with other religions. We can see that statistic and numbers are part of religions as well as part of math.
Economics, Math, Finance, Statistics
Social Media and Time Use
The use of social media has been linked with negative mental health outcomes among adolescence. Based on the data available, you can test and visualize the trends on social media time use among teenagers and compare those trends by gender identities, race and ethnicity, and other characteristics such as family income, public or private school and the safety of their neighborhood they live in. In this project, you will learn to define and narrow down your research question, identify and collect data, pick an appropriate methods to analyze the data for your purpose and present your work using your own creativity and outlet of interest.
Economics, Business
Behavioural economics: effects of nudges
Using either data you collect via an experiment or data found from other sources, you can test how people make different spending decisions based on small changes such as language used in advertisements/informational brochures, design elements choices, curated interactions with peers, updated information on risk, or other features you come up with! In this project you will learn data collection and analysis techniques and explore what subtly influences peoples' choices sometimes even subconsciously. You will read about bounded rationality, information distortions, and biases that affect people's perceived options.
Philosophy, Economics, Math
Regression Predicting College Football Wins
For this project, steps could include: Downloading data related to past college football seasons including overall record; compiling statistics relating to yardarge for offense and yardage given up by defense; gathering statistics relating to head coach- whatever you think might be helpful in explaining the overall record of college football teams! Then once all the stats and data are downloaded and cleaned up, we could run a regression to see if any variables are statistically significant in predicting number of wins for a season.
Economics, Math, Business, Statistics
Analyze your music listening data from Spotify!
Use Python to analyze your music or podcast streaming data (easily downloaded from Spotify) to show trends, your most popular music genres, or whatever else you can think of! Then design a dashboard to view these trends, and deploy it online.
Engineering, Economics, Math
How politics influence the stock market
We will look at the past stock market crashes and panics to determine a link between political events and the U.S. economy in a non-partisan way.
Economics
Surgical Treatment Cost-Effectiveness Model
2. Advanced Research Project. Students will identify a surgical problem that they are passionate about or interested in learning more about. We will work together to study the cost-effectiveness of different solutions to this problem to determine what is best for patients. Students will learn to perform literature review, quantitative data collection, statistical analysis and modeling, and manuscript drafting. Examples include limb salvage vs. prosthesis use after lower limb injury, lumpectomy vs. mastectomy in breast cancer, and open-heart vs. minimally invasive management of aortic valve disease.
Biology, Neuroscience, Surgery, Economics
Final Notes
Economics informs policy by using theoretical models to identify key forces and empirical tools to test and quantify these in actual data. Any project will have elements of policy discussion, theoretical modeling, and empirical analysis.
Economics
Analyzing the economic impacts of COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning and macroeconomic models.
This project aims to use historical data on various economic indicators, such as GDP, unemployment, inflation, etc., and macroeconomic models that capture the interactions between different sectors and agents in the economy to train a machine learning model that can analyze the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on different countries and regions under different policy scenarios. The project will also explore the implications of the analysis for economic recovery and resilience. The project will require skills in data analysis, machine learning, and macroeconomic modeling. The project will be relevant for students who are interested in applied economics, policy evaluation, or development economics.
Economics, Math, Business, Statistics
Unconventional Monetary Policy and the Missing Inflation
Beginning in 2008, central banks have engaged in several large-scale asset purchasing programs (LSAP). Under these programs, central banks purchased trillions of dollars worth of assets from banks. The quantity theory of money states (simply) that if the quantity of money were to double then the price level should also double. Until 2021, there was no significant inflation in the United States. Even after 2021, many economists suggest that LSAPs put relatively little inflationary pressure on prices. Can we find the missing inflation or is the quantity theory of money flawed?
Economics, Math, Business, Statistics
Conceptual projects
Why do prices of worse drugs go up when a new, better drug enters the market? Why do foreign firms outcompete local firms in a variety of industries? What is a platform and how much power does a platform have in the marketplace?
Economics, Business, Statistics
Innovation and the Economy in Modern China
After a period of rapid economic growth, does China have the infrastructure to continue at such a rate? How will the Chinese Communist Party react to future innovation? Through developing an understanding of China's history since the 1950's, explore the complexities behind the challenges China will face in the coming decades.
Economics
Museums
Why do we visit museums? Surveying people's perceptions to visit museums is a complicated undertaking, but with a carefully designed survey instrument, we can uncover interesting motivations and make them known to museums and others, perhaps even to push the field of arts and cultural institutions forward in ways that might better meet their audiences and stakeholders where they are and where they want to be.
Economics
Understanding Legal Entity Types
Have you ever wondered what "inc." or "llc" means after the name of a business? This project will involve a comparison of different entity types and an analysis of when certain entity types are appropriate.
Economics
Social welfare/quality of life metrics
In this project you will analyze various different measures of social welfare, happiness, and living standards and make a case for what features you think should be included in a general wellbeing indicator. You will learn about data collection and methodology issues, GDP distortions, how education, healthcare and income inequality can be incorporated into wellbeing, and how different countries/other geographical areas stack up on different quality-of-life metrics.
Philosophy, Economics, Math
Occupational Licensing
In the 1950s only 5% of jobs required an occupational license in the United States, but by 2018 nearly a quarter of jobs required licensing. Though it is claimed that occupational licensing improves quality of products and services in a sector, some critics claim that licensing can harm consumers and innovation. Are consumers hurt by the increases in occupational licensing? Are prices increased when licensing is implemented and how does that impact consumers? Is there an artificial minimization of supply in these licensed sectors?
Economics, Finance
Understanding COVID's Impact on the Adoption of FinTech
How has the pandemic affected the growth and adoption of fintech solutions in different regions around the world? What are some of the challenges and opportunities that fintech companies have faced as a result of the pandemic, such as changes in consumer behavior or shifts in market demand? These are the types of questions we'll be seeking to answer through this project.
Economics, Finance
Literature Review of Recent Work in Tiling Theory
Tiling theory is a fascinating field of mathematics with applications to DNA computing. Problems essentially relate to which pictures can be created by jigsaw puzzle pieces which can connect in different ways. This field is moving fast, and a lot of interesting work is being done, but a lot of loose ends are left behind that need to be tied up, and a lot of existing work needs to be made more accessible. This project would start with a crash course on complexity theory and methods in theoretical computer science, and then move into reading primary literature in tiling theory and compiling that work into a literature review describing current methods of computing with DNA.
Computer Science, Economics, Math
Money in developing countries
Increasingly, the use of cash in developed countries is lagging in the past against new modern options such as credit cards and mobile applications. However, this is still not the widespread case in developing countries. How behind are they? Let's quantify that!
Economics, Math, Finance, Statistics
