Learning throughout the research process

This afternoon I sat outside on my balcony, opened up NVivo, and got back to coding. The interview I was tackling one of our first interviews, done way back in October. It might have been the first solo interview I did out of the 24 and the one the interviews where, in the interview, I realized I was finding the information I had hoped to uncover in this project. The student was a senior and did a lot of undergraduate research. This was also a student who took a while to get engaged, and throughout the interview speaks about the blame they place on themselves for not getting involved sooner. It’s an interview that has stuck with me and I was excited to code it.

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Reflections and goals for the end of the year

It’s Fall Break here at Penn State and things have been extra quiet in the library. For me, this break means shifting my focus to some bigger projects (like undergraduate research) without being pulled in a million different meeting directions. It’s a needed lull, but I will say that I miss the students and chatting about this project with Ally!

This morning, I sent out the sixth round of recruitment emails. Up until today, Ally and I had been only emailing a handful of our potential subjects, trying to take it a few colleges at a time. We felt that was a way to keep everything manageable and it has worked well so far. However, as we look at our completed interviews (6) versus the ones still left (18), we figured we should try to kick things into a little higher gear. 18 students across 11 colleges received an email from me today. Hopefully a few will be interested and Ally will come back to some scheduled interviews. After this round, we plan on doing two more recruitment periods before December 20, the last day of finals. I’m hoping that as the semester comes to a close, more students will have free time and interest in participating. Ideally, we’re trying to have 12 interviews completed by the end of 2019. It seems possible. We hope.

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