Corro- Senior Thesis

This college process is getting stressful. So many things going on and I think I'll be applying priority status to the University of Tampa but I'm still debating about it. I looked up more scholarships because college isn't going to pay itself. I updated my raise.me account and found how much scholarships the colleges would offer me. I found a scholarship about spreading awareness of fire sparklers and drinking milk and writing an essay about it. I found even more scholarships for minorities but they have requirements I don't meet because of where I live or the field I want to study. There is a scholarship called Pepsico Cesar Chavez that I will be applying to.

I contacted a potential mentor and her name is Raquel Warley and she is an associate professor at California State University, Los Angeles. She has a Ph. D in forensic psychology and a master's in Criminal Justice which is perfect for the thesis I am doing. I also looked up different ways of detecting lies. According to a study done, they could only point out 53% of people who were actually lying or not. That is almost a coin flip. People show different signs when lying.

Is there a way to get information out of a person without making them feel like a victim or freaking them out completely when interrogating them? Today I found out that many people lie during an interrogation because either they were tired and wanted to get out, brainwashed into thinking they did it, being at a wrong spot during the wrong time, just saying what the police want to hear, etc. A case that really stood out to me was the Peter Reilly case. This case happened in 1973 and back then, 18 year old Peter was the primary homicide suspect. They accused him of killing his mother when he clearly didn't do it. He had passed a polygraph test but the police told him he didn't. He was interrogated for eight hours when he finally cracked. He told the police he did it but the timing was wrong and fast forward to the future, he's a free man. While reading this case, it was shocking to see that there are frequent wrong-man convictions and one out of four of them are false confess

I submitted my Priority Application for Loyola University Chicago and have to turn in some papers to Ms. Marberry so the application can be complete. I finally heard back from Wichita State University and I might be eligible to get the fee waived. Yay! I just need to send in my Senior schedule to them and I should be fine. I also emailed an admissions counselor from Baylor because I had a few questions regarding applying to colleges. Apparently, you don't need to apply with the same major for all schools, it depends on the school because they offer different programs. BUT I am still leaning a little more to the Forensic Science Major than Music but it might change, who knows. This is stressful but if I don't major in music, I will definitely continue it in college.

I started my thesis presentation and got a lot of information about trials and how innocent people end up claiming guilty even when they are not. Many innocent people claim they are guilty because of the amount of pressure the police officers put on them or fear. In some cases I read, suspects state that they were tricked into saying what the officers wanted to hear or they "confessed" because the officer refused to feed them or get a phone call. I wonder if there is a better way to getting a confession without forcing them to admit to something they never did without looking at the evidence. hmm

Doing college stuff is stressful but I managed to sync my CommonApp account to Naviance and get started my application for Texas A&M. I have also looked for scholarships for latinos and found that ¡Adelante! offer many scholarships that have different requirements that I meet. I started the Coca-Cola scholarship and started editing my rough draft for college.

I had two thesis in mind but I have narrowed it to one. I was researching about the human cadaver and how people misdiagnose the way they died. I came to a dead end on what to do with it. While researching about cadavers, I found a potential thesis. I think I'll do something about the justice system and how it isn't about the truth and why people lie in trial even when they are trying to find the truth. Like what leads them to lie, the pressure, the crowd, or just being a bad person in general? I started looking up potential mentors and talked to my teacher about it.