Instructor's Notes

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Khalia NadamStudent Self-Reflection

What I Have Learned from My Research Project

1

The two or three most valuable things that I have learned so far in this course relate to the policy-recommendation paper that I started the third week of the semester. This is one of the most challenging assignments that I have ever worked on. But in spite of that difficulty, or maybe because of it, it has also been the most rewarding.

2

As you know from the first draft of my paper, my recommendation is that Kenworth County’s land management agencies use social media and other newer technologies to keep the public and other stakeholders informed about land management policies, controversies, and other issues. The idea came to me rather easily, because I interned at one of the agencies last summer, and I was a personal witness to some of the old-school communication strategies. (For one thing, the Communications Department was still snail-mailing press releases to local media and had a weak Internet presence.)

3

The hard part was researching the full scope of the problem and determining possible solutions. The agency where I interned, and all the other ones that I contacted for my research, kept mostly paper files, all of them quite outdated. So I relied mostly on interviewing key personnel and asking questions like these: Why does your agency have no social media presence? Why is there no news feed on the Web site? Other than the press releases being sent to local newspapers and radio stations, what else is being done to get agency news out?

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4

I would say that the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from this assignment are that (1) when researching a current and local issue, interviews can be one of the most valuable ways of gathering evidence, (2) the research process took a lot longer than I thought it would, so I’ll try to get an earlier start on future research projects, and (3) I should have created an outline before diving in on my first draft. I ended up doing a ton of reorganizing after that draft, and I have a feeling that even a rough outline would have helped me think through the structure of my writing in advance.

5

In terms of what I need to work on more, again, I need to get an earlier start on research for future writing projects and do a better job of planning/outlining papers. It is also clear from the feedback I received on my first draft that I need to spend more time on editing and proofreading. Because the final draft is due next Monday, I’m going to devote at least a couple of evenings to both tasks.

6

I’m confident that I can apply what I’ve learned in other contexts. In fact, I’ve already started doing that. While working on the policy-recommendation paper, I was also assigned a research paper for a history course, which I recently completed. Because of what the policy-rec paper taught me about the value of outlining, I prepared a pretty detailed outline for the history paper, and that really helped.

7

I’m also pretty sure that what I’ve learned will help me in the workplace. I have been thinking that I would like to work in communications for an environmental organization. So the insights I got from this project should be very helpful. But even if I work in some other field, I can’t imagine that I won’t benefit from the research and writing skills I’ve applied to this project.

Questions to Start You Thinking

Meaning

Writing Strategies