HR: Personal Notes, Blog
At the end of a long, oftentimes tumultuous semester, there is much to reflect on. We began the year with a blog post with the topic, “What are you most apprehensive about in this class?” My response was simple; I was worried about combining the mathematics portion with International Studies. Now, clearly my fears were misplaced, as the kind of formulaic math that I was anticipating never reared it’s face throughout our assignments. But how ironic that my uninformed apprehension towards the coming semester would be directed at something so inconsequential, and that the true looming challenge to my experience in IS-301 would in fact be virus that exists much further out of my control.
As my posts progressed throughout the semester, there’s a theme of enjoyment of discovery at the start. I enjoyed getting familiarized with the methods used by researchers to design projects to collect truly accurate data to contribute to the discussion of political science. I recognized early on that SPSS, depending on what subject I choose, could be a crucial element to developing my capstone next year. This realization helped me to buckle down and delve a bit deeper into the subject material as the weeks went by.
After I had a chance to begin internalizing the lessons, I started making connections with this class and other IS courses that I had the privilege to take. One the things that gets me excited about education is when I’m able to look and see the big picture of why we study the things that we do. In the realm of IS, I began to see how different forms of studying Political Theory, Comparative Politics, and Techniques of Computer Analysis fit together to support one another and provide a much greater pool of collective knowledge. Comparative takes the information collected through the methods learned in this class and helps interpret and apply them to the real world. Political Theory goes a step further to try and rationalize why events play out the way they do. However, none of this analysis could take place without the collection of accurate data, and so I began to better appreciate the virtues of social science data collection.
Learning the ins and out of SPSS proved an ongoing challenge, though not an impossible one to resolve. As time progressed it no longer appeared to be such a big and scary a program to tackle, although there’s still so much I have to learn about it. One thing I struggled most with initially was making sure I put the correct independent and dependent variable in their appropriate boxes when running analyses. But, once I gained a better understanding of the true definitions of those variables, I was able to correct that trend in error. Learning how to self-correct in similar instances was a lesson that allowed me to get much more comfortable with the manner of class instruction about halfway through the semester.
I do not excel in independent study. However, the second half of the semester presented itself as an opportunity to improve my skills in that area once the nation found itself quarantined at home. My later posts discuss the difficulties we faced in coordinating our group research project for the class. Around that time many of us were also struggling to coordinate to facilitate choosing class leadership for VMI next year and were conducting many Zoom and Teams interviews with underclassmen. The skills we developed in coordinating from a distance helped facilitate our group work in IS-301, and while I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish, I still feel our efforts would have been more fruitful had we been together at VMI.
I found that my education this semester has worn many faces, many of them not necessarily academic. Certainly, learning how to navigate SPSS, understanding the nuances of the study of social science, and developing my own research project were some major points I learned in IS-301. But in my time at home, this class has also managed to impress upon me the age-old VMI hallmarks of perseverance, discipline, and the value of quality communication. At the end of it all, my successes and failures in each of those areas showed me much about who I am outside of the structure VMI. It’s refreshing to be afforded this opportunity to develop such a perspective, and in my opinion this insight is a kind of silver lining to our current state of affairs.
