For my MUED 371 Scholarship Project, our assignment was to write a research paper on a topic that related to beginning instrumental music. Below is a walk-through of my project from the initial one paragraph proposal, reference list development, annotated bibliography/outline, paper, and the poster. For me, it was difficult writing this research paper; there was so much information that it was overwhelming to begin researching. The hardest part was narrowing down my topic enough so that I did not have information overload, but not narrowing it too much so that I did not have enough information to write a paper. It was easy to find one source and look at the reference list of that article, which then led me down a rabbit trail of multiple sources and a plethora of tabs on my laptop. Once I had all my articles, reading them, deciding if and how they related well to my thesis, and synthesizing them proved challenging and took a significant amount of time. What worked well for me was citing my sources in APA format simply because I have had a lot of practice doing it in the past year, that it’s semi fun and relaxing to do at this point. I got stuck initially writing my paper and deciding how to outline my paper so that all the sources were incorporated and supported my thesis well. The best thing for me to do at that point was get a giant table in Carrier Library, spread out all my books, and write on a whiteboard to see where my brain was thinking. I got most of my help from Dr. Stringham, who pushed me to critically think about the importance of my topic and why it needed to be argued for.
I love having the ability to present research both in a paper format and in a poster format. I think having both options allows students who think in different ways to sort through their ideas in various formats. It was easier for me to write the paper first and then draw from that to design my poster, but I recognize that for some of my other peers, the opposite worked better for them. I personally feel like standard research posters are too verbose and are not visually accommodating because they contain chunks of text on a single large page. I know that I do not enjoy reading that and I feel like a poster should visually display the important ideas in a captivating manner while the paper can have all the verbiage if someone wants to read it. That’s why I appreciated having the ability to cater to what I thought a poster should look like and what I think would be easiest for people to understand. I enjoyed doing this research and learning about a topic that I was interested in! |
Davina MiawOn this page, I will present examples of my scholarship in the form of reflective essays and philosophical assignments. Archives
November 2019
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