the world, this one involved data collection right here at our university. The “N” was no longer anonymous. It was our students -- all of them. This created a higher degree of visibility and need for coordination with outside partners than had ever been the case on any of my other projects. The senior leadership who opened the doors to help us launch a study of this magnitude also gave us the ultimate challenge: the project could not just be about the research; it had to be about how it would benefit the students and the broader universityi. It couldn’t just be “our” research project; Spit for Science had to be a university and community resource. Some of you may be reading this and thinking that sounds like your worst nightmare; I found it tremendously exciting (albeit naively, as I couldn’t have fully appreciated what I was embarking on at that time).
