In Class/OutClassed

First I really want to say something about my on-campus interview. This is the first time I communicate with people as an interviewer. At first I thought it would be easy, cauz it’s all about ask questions, answer questions and record people’s words. But it turned out that being a great interviewer is really hard. I have to admit that when I designed my questions for my interviewees, I was making assumptions about how they will answer them. Or, in other words, I know what I HOPE them to say in order to gain some useful information to prove my thesis of my essay. But actually when I finished conducting my entire interview, I found that actually almost all my interviewees answered those questions in a way that I didn’t expected them to answer, which means that I had to try change my claim. When I went over my notes trying to come up with a new topic for my essay, I really rethought many questions. I used to believe that I knew answer to these questions, which turned out only my own assumption. For example, one of my questions that I designed for my professor of English workshop is do students from different socioeconomic backgrounds perform differently? I thought her answer would be like “students from higher class families are more confident, whereas students from lower class families are more quiet.” But actually her answer was “there is no distinct difference.” I realized that actually I regarded my own assumptions for many problems as the truth.

Despite my initial apprehension and borderline anxiety about the depth of this paper in combination with the new element of interviewing, I really enjoyed this project. I was incredibly surprised by the openness of my interviewees in the subject and was really excited to start working on my paper after I had completed them all. Especially because I had really gotten involved in each of my interviews and the stories they represented, I was positive that this had to be the best paper I've written thus far; however, I feel like because of this attachment to the topic and pressure of very high expectations, I was not very happy with the outcome of the paper. I really wanted to capture the essence of each of the interviews, so that I could strongly prove my point, and when I was talking about that point and about how I planned to prove it, I felt that it was clear. When I got to the writing aspect, however, I feel as though my argument was lost in including too much interview content and not enough explanation. I am definitely going to continue revising this paper because I really want to use the interviews as much as I can, while getting my claim across clearly. I think it's something I'd like to work on because I feel so invested in the topic and in conveying the students' stories as they pertain to my topic.

This paper was difficult for me in that I'm not sure I adequately understand what a research paper is supposed to be like. I didn't have a problem using my interview data to support my claim, but was that what we were supposed to be doing? I felt just like I was writing one of our usual papers but using the interviews as texts. Beyond my confusion about the format of the essay, I really enjoyed hearing first hand accounts from my interviews, and using my peers' knowledge to provide data for a topic that I am interested in. Although I didn't end up using one of my interviews in my essay, seeing a different, administrative view of Bryn Mawr was certainly very helpful and enlightening. In the end, I'm not sure I was able to do myself and my efforts justice with this paper. It was difficult for me to present the information in a concise, scientific way when so much of my information was personal to the speakers. However, I did find that my thoughts flowed onto the paper easier this time around. I think this comes from the amount of papers that we've written so far and that my writing is finally growing to reflect/catch up with my expanding thoughts. If I could go back, I think it would have been helpful for me to have seen/ learned about what is meant by a research paper, similiarly or in conjuction with how we learned about interviewing. 

I find this style of academic writing to be a lot more enjoyable than many other types of academic writings. I wouldn’t say that it’s easier because it’s definitely is not, but it’s a lot more interesting. I think what makes it a harder form of academic writing is that there is so much information from my interviews that I feel obligated to include in my paper. What also makes it difficult is that because I made my claim and interview questions before I actually interviewed someone, I had a specific idea in my head about what I wanted to try and prove in my essay. What makes it frustrating is that I didn’t get the answers/results that I was looking for and for that reason, I wasn’t able to exactly support my claim. I think that this form of writing has made it possible for me to question what I have written and if what I have written actually makes sense…

Hi everyone,

This is just a post about the upcoming event with Tania Chairez at TGH ths coming Tuesday. Professor Cameron sent out an email to the Class of 2015 but I figured I'd post about it here in case he missed anybody:

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to write this paper. I can't tell if it was because I got to think out loud and formulate my thesis during my one-on-one with Professor Cohen or if it was because it was a topic that I could write about forever because I was a part of the interviewing process too. My paper largely focused on the experiences of first-year Posse scholars so far and how the scholarship has benefited them. I interviewed three of my friends from the Posse and it was interesting to hear their answers because they were very much the type of answers I would've given because I'm going through the same things as them. It was so nice to not have to look for a reading and cite authors and squeeze quotes into my paper. Citing other readings from our classes just seem to be particularly difficult to me for some reason. Sometimes I'll write a paper with my claim and my personal thoughts and then someone will suggest that I use a reading to back my claim up. I didn't have to do that this time because my source of reading was my own self! I took my own notes and I was able to make a profound claim all on my own, not based on some other scholar who had the idea first.

One thing I have noticed about my writing overall is that it does get easier each week. While I still struggle to produce paper's I feel comfortable turning in, the process has become increasingly easier, and I find that our weekly papers have given me a great sense of growth. However, this paper was extremely challenging for me to write, and I am still unsure as to if I completed the task in the way I should have. I felt unprepared, and I wished that I could have gotten just a few more voices to place into the paper. Overall, I felt as though my paper was too representative of my own thoughts and voice, and I struggled to find a thesis out of the information I had. I also felt uncomfortable with quoting my interviewees because without "real" quotations, I was nervous about overstating things they had said. 

My writing process gave me a lot of ideas as far as how to address issues of class on campus, but again, these were personal thoughts. While they were influenced by my interviewees, I wish I had put more voice of others into the paper. I definitely think that this week's writing has a lot of room for revision. 

This kind of writing is totally new to me. Writing a paper based on your interviews and real life workshop is a very hard job, but I did learn a lot from that. I recognize the importance of making questions for an interview. It's obvious that we need to make open-ended questions, but to what extent? At first, I tried to make my questions very general. I thought by doing that, my interviewees wouldn't be limited by the narrow topics. They could have more space to express themselves. However, what happened was contradictory to what I expected. Because they are general questions, people just give me general answers. These answers are not deep enough to write a paper. I had to add so many small questions to get the information I want. Even though I tried my best, the information I got from all sources were not deep enough for me to write a good paper. To me, it's easier to write an essay based on complicated ideas from the texts rather than little stories I heard from the interviews. I just have 3 interviewees and all of my interviews just last for about half an hour, it's hard to step away from the simple ideas and acquire indepth information. However, it's nice to go beyond classroom and experience what happen in real life. It's a wonderful exercise that make students become more familiar with social research. I think all of us may have many difficulties and make mistakes for the first time, but we do learn a lot from this experience.

figure out how to delete this. sorry, guys.