How do you start a research project in general?
Whether you are choosing a topic for a presentation or a long experiment driven project it can definitely be tough. Research projects are difficult to think of because sometimes it (especially most STEM research) can be expensive or very open ended. Many times I start by brainstorming a list of interesting topics and looking up different past research that I could reference or build off of in my projects.
It is very important to take the time to brainstorm because when rushed it is more difficult to find sources and connect the dots of your ideas; this is why I enjoy brainstorming conferences so much, because a good foundation is key when it comes to research- or any writing for that matter.
Once I find a topic that interests me I dive in deeper and find as many articles as possible to help me set up. When you have a topic narrowed down and some background information you can develop your research question, what do you want to find out? How are you going to find out?
How We Came Up with Our Research Idea: Hot Take: What Professors Really Think About the Writing Center
In the past month Mackenzie and I have been working on our topics research project to present at the IWCC on April 8th. We wanted to look into the perceptions of the writing center held by different professors across multiple departments so that we could address any misconceptions and build a stronger relationship with our professors as consultants. In Topics class we were brainstorming different research topics when this idea came to me. I was thinking about how some professors require conferences much more than other professors and that it would be interesting to talk to them and see why they require or don’t require them. This then prompted thoughts into how these answers would possibly differ by department and types of writing. Our research question was: how do professors perceive the writing center and how can we build our relationships to be a better resource for everyone?
What should we ask?
We decided that we wanted to interview a few different professors to see what they thought about the writing center:
how they envisioned a conference happening
why they required or didn’t require conferences for certain assignments
if they have taught FYS and used a writing fellow and their experience with that
if they had any suggestions on how we as a writing center could build a stronger relationship with faculty.
How we went about our research- The interview process
After completing the IRB certification and writing a proposal, we reached out via email to a number of professors from multiple departments. We reached out to Dr. Cozine and Dr. Christensen from the biology department, Dr. Brown in psychology, Dr. Miller in math, Dr. Johnson in African American studies, and Dr. Hausknecht in writing. Jane also provided us with a round of interview transcripts from a similar topics research project from 2003. First we read through the past interviews to get a feel for the questions that they asked and which ones we would want to ask in our own interviews. Once we had interview times set up with each of the professors we finalized our list of questions. When we were interviewing the professors we recorded the interview so we could type up a transcript and we took notes on their answers to our questions.
How did this process go?
Overall the starting process of this project was very smooth. The questions that we came up with produced a lot of conversation which was the goal and our interviews were productive. I think we went about starting this project in a good way and our starting process made the research itself much easier.
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