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IS 301 was for me personally, probably the toughest singular international studies at VMI. I have basically always struggled with math and statistics since grade school and had been dreading this class since I squeaked by Rat statistics as a freshman. While it wasn’t all doom and gloom, starting the semester off with the SPSS assignments was a slog, I was fine with a few assignments on my own but I continuously got tripped up by minute details in them that whittled down my grades and confidence. With some help I squeaked through the tougher ones but several ended in me frankly just giving up trying to follow along in the book. Like I said, hardest International studies class I’ve taken.

The Thyme readings were fairly simple and straight forward, many of the concepts I recognized from other classes. I remember my quiz grades being fine and only mistaking smaller details. In class I felt I understood a lot of the concepts and when called on I could (mostly) reason my way to the right answer. It was just the application on SPSS I for the life of me couldn’t figure out and was not good at. I was worried originally about the large project but I very much enjoyed my group, Olivia and Tom carried us through in SPSS and Sarita for being a third was excellent at being our Johnny on the spot with whatever we needed.

I really enjoyed our group project topic as I very much enjoy studying and comparing ideology and the differing variations of them. Defining, measuring and thinking through how they worked, and then taking my definitions and using them to gauge the corps of cadets was very interesting and enjoyable. I was surprised and happy I handled putting together the data and transcribing it into SPSS, my fear was just being the scribe for the paper and not contributing much to the actual research gathering. I’m very thankful our survey managed to work as I noted in a blog post as well as for the long hours the team put in (and of course needed guidance from Col Sanborn). One thing I didn’t enjoy was the presentation, as it seemed mostly to be a distraction from the paper, which from my perspective is the core of the class. While I understand presenting findings is crucial to this line of research and reporting, it seemed really to take away and further confuse us as we handled the big paper, not to mention taking time away from sculpting it out.

The project as an assignment I felt was an excellent experience and extremely unique amongst other assignments i have had in my cadetship here. Building everything from the ground up, data and all, really made me personally appreciate all of the studies, graphs and research I have read for classes and put into perspective the difficulty of getting this research completed, published and criticized. Even reviewing our own project ourselves prior to submission we were coming up with faults, additional research, what could have been done better or adjusted to get a better outcome. The refinement process never seemed to end and frankly I feel could have easily kept going on and on with. Overall I am satisfied with our work as a whole where we did decide to draw the line.

All in all, I am glad the class is done and I am glad my group was as good as they were. While I am certainly not happy ever having to fight for a C, especially in a major IS class which I have never had to do. I certainly will not argue with 5)3 grade as I did struggle through much of the individual work and let my emotion and frustration get the better of me. In hindsight, I should have been more proactive in seeking help from Col Sanborn, as when I did go for help it cleared up any issue I ran into. Other then that, staying on top of my blogs from the getgo and pushing the group to do more earlier in the semester. I am happy I had the experience and know that I have a definite weakness in working with databases and the like, it’s something I will have to work to improve and be cognizant of.

Spent two days throwing together the needed SPSS calculations for the poster, figuring out the extra items Howie recommended we come up with proved nearly impossible, spent two hours trying to figure it out as a group but ended up sending the data. I didn’t track to much after we gave up but doesn’t effect my making of my sections of the final paper so all is well I suppose.

Surprised handling the data has been mostly my department as I certainly wasn’t the best at SSP. Seems easy enough, I got Howie to approve my method (well Olivia did), which I tired to keep as common sense-y as possible, really just making the yeses and nos 1s and 0s. Converting the answers to these 1’s and 0’s was a bit mind numbing, but I kept it efficient, finished it before SRC with a little help from Olivia and Tom. Glad I finally feel like I made a large contribution, Sarita has mostly been at the forefront of this thing from my understanding as of right now.

WENT MUCH BETTER THEN I THOUGHT. What a massive relief. Even with 3 botched mass emails (Will Reeves is a saint), we got a solid turnout, 171 total responses. Glad I don’t have to go room to room Mafioso style and shake information out of people.

This has most definitely been the most stressful part of the overall project, my biggest fear is a lack of responses and how we’ll have to deal with that, we are honestly considering going room to room and wrangling 30 people per class ourselves. Awful. Lets hope for the best.

Got the IRB sheet back from Howie, good feedback, easy fixes, mostly just clarification and his inquiring as to where I was inspired by the questions I came up with. Sarita and I cleaned it up by the end of the class period and should be cleared by next time. Hoping we can stick to timetables (ie getting it approved by the end of the day) a bit better as the semester draws down.

Hoping our project is selected quickly. Putting it together seemed to easy which has me figuritvly speaking on the edge of my seat. Sarita and Olivia have done a good job, hope my questions are good enough, should be fine.

Very happy with my question creation, built up and around from a similar ideology test Ive ran into online. It seemed to get the Howie gold stamp of approval. I am worried a few questions may not connect with non-liberal arts people, but I’m confident the majority are simple enough to get a solid data sample out of whoever responds.

To start I’m happy with my group, our resident third luckily has free time enough to do a lot of heavy lifting, which is good for us firsts juggling capstone along with this. Our project is based around political ideology and commissioning status; I’m interested to see if the baseline at VMI is as far to the right as my 4 years would imply, or if there are more of us VMI liberals in hiding then I thought.

So, haven’t exactly been on top of these, as is tradition. In short, I’ve struggled with the SPSS stuff due to what seems to me like technical understanding. The book in most cases I felt didn’t really help, but I can’t remember the last math/numbers-based class I was good at so its probably just me. Quizzes have gone well enough, not really content I’m suffering from, mostly just applying the actual information on the data itself and following along in the book; it does an outstanding job of making me feel dumb.