This class was very interesting in comparison to my other previous classes. I think it was a good switch up curriculum wise for me, and also it was eye opening in that it showed the more scientific side of the international studies major, I guess more appropriately called in this case, political science. The class allowed us as students to engage with the real world honestly for the first time. We got to use relevant technology to practice finding real results found in real data, conducted by real researchers and studies.
Getting to play with SPSS was cool. I wasn’t aware how powerful a computer program could be. It obviously saved hours or perhaps days worth of time with our research project. Also, it made it streamed lined to test our theory.
Specifically regarding the research paper it was the climax of the class, in enjoyment. I obviously, felt the stress and disliked the time crunch, but learn a lot and it brought the class full circle. It also let made me appreciate academics way more who deal with greater sample populations testing and analyzing variables far more complex and difficult to capture. That being said, just in the environment of VMI there was so many relevant topics to do research in, that were interesting. This project as a whole expanded how I think about the world, but particularly politics and the behind scenes work of politics. What I mean by that includes, creating a targeted political campaign for a candidate or issue, as well as the art and science behind policy development and critique/analysis. This was the highlight of the class because I enjoyed the uniqueness of the project and how it made me think critically about the whole scientific process. Being in a group helped tremendously! It allowed for discussion and the flow of so many good ideas as we developed our final presentation, paper.
The turning points for me as a student this semester in this class were as follows. First, statistically the reminder of how important decimals and proper placement are. I know this is fairly trivial or simple, but not being in a math class for a extended time period, I definitely needed the reminder. Secondly, also regarding statistics, I found much value in learning how to analyze statistical tables and results. Learning the proper way to determine correlation between variables X and Y and interpreting how strong the correlation was, was extremely valuable especially as we worked toward preforming our own testing for our research project. Thirdly, as I worked on finding sources for my research paper, as I said before, I found how valuable doing background research was as you develop your own research question and theory. It was ridiculous to see how many past research had been done, but more importantly sifting through all these past studies allowed my group to look deeper than simply “is physical fitness correlated to GPA”. Furthermore, doing this reading into the past, helped us define terms and use preexisting ones, to be more professional in our report.
Again I enjoyed the class and it was greatly refreshing. My main takeaways from the class are that process matters in regards to collecting data to achieve the standard need to be acceptable research. This includes confidentiality of participants and other things like assuring randomness. Also, this class and in particular, the research study and paper made me think far more critically about the world, most time things don’t happen just because one external influences, but usually a variety of external actors that in conjunction produce one outcome/result. I also learned about literature reviews for the first time and how they help refine theories and guide your research. Lastly, I takeaway that there’s always more research to be done. There’s always more questions to ask, more research to be done, and more results to analyze. Meaning there is hope for every problem we as a world experience and this class, I believe, opened a new door for me to explore how to do my part in educating and providing solutions to the world, and for that I am thankful.
-Caleb
