Don't Think About It

               

This image is taken from eecs.harvard.edu and is a good representation of what research is like. 

Apparently writing a research paper comes along with a good amount of difficulty and frustration. Not even actually writing a research paper, just doing the tasks that need to be completed before writing the paper, such as thinking of research questions, thinking of a thesis, and engaging in the research itself. These pre-exercises alone come along with a lot of difficulty.

                For me to come up with research questions and to figure out my topic and thesis I literally had to sit there for a good hour just to think. After I thought for quite some time and finally figured out a thesis, I’m still not completely sure if it’s too broad, or too detailed. Figuring out a thesis for this research paper was kind of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it had to be just right. After coming up with my thesis which I think should be sufficient for a 7 to 9 page research paper I started to feel like I was getting somewhere. I was relieved at that moment.

                Then I got to the researching part. I had some questions formed which was a good place to start. I used key terms from each potential question in doing the research. Doing the research seemed like the most important part to me. I used Google Scholar, Google News, and the library data bases available and what I noticed was that there were so many options. There were almost too many choices. I got kind of overwhelmed by the number of options I had. I researched different aspects of my topic and found sources that seemed to have the most interesting and relevant information concerning my topic. When I was done I noticed I had a long list of potential sources. With this paper we can only have a maximum of ten sources, so I had to go through all of mine and narrow it down to ten. I have written research papers in the past I have just never really taken the time to think about the frustration that comes along with tasks that seem so simple.