Anna's Blog

       When we visited the library for the second time, we learned about scholarly research. I learned a lot that day that I will be carrying with me throughout my time in college and even beyond. For starters, I never would have thought that Wikipedia could actually be helpful for research. Wikipedia being capable of anything good revolving around research goes against everything I was taught in middle school and high school. I was also once again not aware of how helpful the library can actually be.      Throughout all of middle school and high school, we are taught that Wikipedia is bad and we should not even think about going near it when doing research. I did not realize that it actually had something truly helpful to offer. For the last 4 years or more, the only purpose I have used Wikipedia for is looking up movies, reading about their statistics and performances, and reading their plots. I had no idea it could actually be useful. We were taught...

    Last week the class spent the entirety of the period in a room in the library to learn about researching. While I was not able to stay for the entire class, I was able to stay for the first hour. During that hour I feel that I learned a lot. I am very familiar with basic researching. Not only did I do it all the time in high school and even before, but I love researching my own topics on my own time outside of school. I get curious about random topics, and I love searching for the answers in books and on the internet. I started picking up on how to tell which sources were more credible than others. I even researched how to properly research several times to pick up on more techniques and skills. Still, I was not aware of everything we learned in the library that day and I am glad I was able to hear it.      First of all, I learned new techniques about searching for the most credible sources. I also learned that those most credible sources will always be acce...

      I had a very hard time coming up with a research topic because I could not think of something that was a real problem that I truly felt connected to. I thought about doing a number of smaller topics that do not have as great of an impact in the world, but sort of connect with me. I finally decided on a topic, but ultimately chose very late.      At first I was going through various small problems. The example in class was about cars and headlights. Honestly that sort of threw me off a bit, because I immediately was trying to find a problem in the real world that matched that as far as severity was concerned. In the end, I started to give up on that. I still couldn't think of a topic though. I thought about continuing my microtheme, which was about procrastination. The problem was that I could barely write one page about procrastination, and I knew I would certainly not be able to write about it for 4 to 6 pages.      Eventually I decide...