Post 3: Why I Love Research

Throughout my many experiences in school the one thing that I absolutely despised was research papers. I always thought trying to find sources with relevant information took forever, I hated trying to write my own paper using terms and phrases of other people, and I always found it difficult to explicitly write out whatever was in my head. Not to mention that most of the time, I saved almost all of my work until the last minute. I hated research papers. Unfortunately, I was so busy feeling bad for myself when I received a research assignment, that I never truly understood how great of a learning tool research was.

I think what initially induced the fear of research papers was the fact that sometimes I couldn't choose my own topic and I was stuck writing about something I had no interest in (like that time in 5th grade I had to research the cotton gin and write a couple paragraphs about it). Of course later in high school and college we were given more freedom on topic selection and I found myself writing about more interesting things that weren't the cotton gin. But I still didn't fully understand why I had to do all of this work to write one paper. Even when I got to college I thought research papers were not how I wanted to spend my time. My sophomore year I took some research based classes and had to write a few papers, but I thought that was just teaching me how to write scientific papers. It seriously took me until the end of my junior year and this summer to realize the true value of research papers and projects. 

This past semester I took a class called Applied Wildlife Research where another student and I came up with our own research question, designed a project, and actually collected some data for our final report. Disclaimer, we had to research previous work done on our topic so that could learn more about our topic and so that we could create a project that would work and give us results to write about. The cool thing was, after doing the initial literature research before starting our project, we actually knew exactly what we wanted to do and how to execute our project. Wow! When I started this water quality project with Dr. Meierdiercks, I (surprise, surprise) had to do some research on the study area and what the current known state of the watershed is.

After doing all of the research I have done in the past few weeks, it (finally) fully clicked for me. Reading all of these reports and studies helped me learn a lot about my study area, what is known about the water quality in my study area, what else needs to be studied, and what can be done to improve this area. The key word here is learn. We are doing this research project to further expand our knowledge on the Patroon Creek watershed and so people can learn more about their environment. But initially I needed to expand my very little knowledge on the watershed. Now that I know even more information about the watershed and where I will be working, I am even more excited to be participating in this project. I'm so excited to see what data we collect and to analyze it. I'm so excited to see what results we come up after all of the research (and learning) that I have been doing the past three weeks.