This course is designed to give VMI cadets the knowledge to be able to collect data and analyze political processes and institutions, with the help of SPSS. I learned a lot about being patient and how I need to work harder from the get go in order to succeed at these projects and homework assignments and quizzes. Overall I really did enjoy this class, even if I got a bit frustrated at times. I think that COL Sanborn did a pretty good job of teaching a subject that no one had any experience with and ended up having a lot of students to a good job with the research.
A lot of the work was that done with the SPSS book was taxing and took a lot longer than I originally assumed it would. The first two home assignments took me at least three hours each to figure out because I have never ever done anything like this with computers in my entire life. Once I got the hang of it I actually really ended up enjoying the homework and conducting data and analyzing it. Honestly, it made me proud that I could figure out how to utilize what is necessary for my capstone or my national security capstone. I really hope that I am able to use this in the future, possibly at grad school, because having the knowledge of how the world works is one thing, but actually being able to test that knowledge is a brand new world for me.
Quizzes. The quizzes in the class dropped me from an A to a C, which is really disappointing. I believe I made stupid mistakes, but I worked so hard on everything else that it seriously upsets me that I screwed up and no matter what I did I couldn’t bring my grade back up. I wish that I had figured out earlier on that the quizzes mattered so much. In the end it’s my own fault, but I think for the future that it would be beneficial to have more than three quizzes throughout the year to enable students to bring their grades up later on.
The in class time was useful, especially towards the end when my group of Jordan, Madeleine, and Joseph were slaving over our group project. When started with the literature review because that was the easier thing to focus on. Jordan and I got to teach Madeleine and Joseph how to do a literature review because we had learned before in COL Foster’s research designs class a year ago. Then after we complied everything we learned, we began to collect research. Jordan is on the RDC so he had access to all of the Rat’s record and could compile all of the number of RDC send ups each rat had had. Then myself, Madeleine, and Joseph dug into the Registrar’s office to get everyones’ company, sport, commissioning status, etc. It took a bit of time to actually get all of this research and data down into an excel sheet and code it correctly, due to a few mistakes with numbers. What’s to expect, we are all International Studies majors? Afterwards it was just a matter of analyzing the data together and then finding time outside of class to sit down and write our research paper, which proved way more difficult that any of us thought. I think that the fact that you gave us some days off or days that were dedicated to the research were incredibly helpful. The project finally coming together made this class really worth while and meaningful. I hope that in the future, after VMI, I will have the opportunity to work with SPSS again.
Looking back on all of these blogs it gives me a good understanding of how much I’ve learned from this class and how far I’ve come. I was so incredibly frustrated with the SPSS analysis before it finally clicked one day. I seriously am thankful that I got to take this class in college because it gave me a branch new appreciation for how hard scholarly research, especially quantitative research is. It has been a long semester but I am happy to say that I have learned quite a bit about research collection and analysis.