At the beginning of this class, I was not sure what to expect. While I had received numerous ominous emails about the difficulty of the class, this contradicted about what I had heard about the class. On the first day of class, I felt that the class schedule was a lot to track in my schedule. I also felt that choosing a topic within the first week seemed unreasonable. I didn’t know what to choose; I could have performed a very technical and esoteric study or a very creative one. However, I knew that I wanted to do something where little research existed within the field.
The course became very difficult and stressful when I wrote the introduction and literature review because I had yet to change my topic to its current state. After performing close-reading, I decided that I definitely wanted to change my topic, and the close reading showed me the importance of fully reading the articles instead of reading only certain sections. I was worried at this point that I would not be able to keep up while performing regular blog assignments. This indeed was true and the fact that Marlen performed a random blog check on the one day I was not able to keep up made me consider dropping the class. However, I did not drop the class and instead performed well until I was about to launch the survey. Around this time, the class became a hassle, as I would consistently become demotivated after undirected anger in the class was released, which I interpreted as directed towards myself, even though I knew it was not the case. Hence, I was not able to launch the survey until some classes were canceled and I was not demotivated. Once I collected the data, I felt much better; this was my proudest moment in the class and was a great sigh of relief. The data analysis was the most fun part, and confirmed some of my hypotheses and research I had read.
One way I turned my worries and anxieties into strength was by being very thorough in grooming the research, even after I had changed my topic. I am somewhat of a perfectionist and did not want to turn in an assignment without performing adequate and correct research on the topic.
My future goal as a writer is to use the skills I learned in this class and apply it to my career in IT design and development. I know that I will have to creatively make presentations combining artistry, technical specifications, and good style and convention to businesses. While I may not have to write a full research paper, I will certainly have to perform studies and analysis such as the one I conducted. In addition, I will have to communicate to those higher in the chain of command the best options and the backing reasoning. I feel as if I already had the work ethic and time-management skills before the class, but the class reminded me that they will always need to be utilized.
Finally, the thing that will ‘stick with me’ for the longest amount of time after this class is the sense of community that the class fashioned. You could always walk into class and exchange in free discussion of everyone’s topic and receive constructive feedback about your plans. I liked how the ‘groups’ worked in the class, even if they were not utilized much towards the end of the semester. While most groupwork causes a disproportionate amount of work to fall on one or two members, the way groups were utilized in this class fostered individualism and worked well with the subject material. In the future, if I get a project management position in IT, I will remember this type of unit and use it appropriately within the organization, as it would be beneficial.
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