In Unit 3 we designed surveys and compiled data for our Formal Proposal. We submitted a draft to our team for peer review.
Formal Proposal
I found the Formal Proposal assignment fun. I chose to research how commuting and employment affected study time and course selection for UBC students and made recommendations on how to improve distance education at UBC. The topic I chose was close and personal to me. Living in Squamish means I must take at least 7-8 hours of my day to get to 2 classes. If there were more availability online, I could take more classes. I concluded there must be a whole cohort of adults who felt and thought the same. Designing the surveys on Qualtrics was a bit of a challenge. It has been a long time since I have used the program, and I required a few refreshers to figure out the formatting. Distributing the surveys went differently than I anticipated. Initially, I was going to post on Reddit, only to learn that Reddit only accepts post-graduate research that has been ethically approved. My PSYC instructor agreed to let me post the survey on the class Piazza discussion board, and I found another relevant Facebook group to post in too. I was worried that this would be more of an in-person collection of data scenario, which at the time felt tedious and daunting. But the online survey made it enjoyable. The compilation of the data into charts and graphs was my favourite. I enjoyed watching the data come to life and tell a story. Interviewing the instructors was also fun and yielded totally opposing views. Compiling the professors’ responses with the data and supporting literature resulted in a robust analysis section.
Writing the proposal draft seemed hard at first, but once I got on a roll, I worried my assignment would be too long. Conciseness is not my strong suit, so this is challenging me to practice it. The writing plan that I made up in a previous assignment was invaluable. Sticking to it helped me to stay ahead with writing, and as a result, I finished more than I needed to. I even had to make a separate draft as I had already written up the letter of transmittal and references. When I started this proposal, I kept thinking about how to improve the students’ problems. I realized that I had to emphasize what UBC would gain from my recommendations and that helping the students is a secondary benefit. It was good practice and had me reflect on my real-life work emails where I can get caught in this trap. I look forward to writing them better to see if I can achieve better outcomes.
Peer Review
The peer review was also fun to do. Though the reviews always take me a lot longer than I anticipated. I provided so many suggestions I was worried that I might come across as being harsh. This time I edited thoroughly to remove any “persons” and avoided all imperative verbs. The peer review included revisions suggesting numerous paragraph and heading changes, and I found it difficult to write it clearly. It is much easier to illustrate these changes while editing over Google Docs, or in person. I hope this peer review illustrated what I have learned from writing the previous two. I also hope that I was able to provide some valuable feedback.
Upon receiving my peer review, I found that most of my revisions focused on formatting, which I expected as it was a first draft. My reviewer suggested I resize my visuals to make them larger and to clarify a few points in the definitions. She also pointed out that sentences don’t usually start with numbers. I was unsure if this differed for a data section, and after some research concluded she was correct. I revised all the sentences to the proper formatting. I felt overall that there weren’t too many things to alter which bolstered my confidence that I was on the right track.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I feel I have been keeping up with all the assignments well and that my writing is improving. I still must re-look up APA citation/reference formatting every time I use it. I do not often use it in my everyday life. Grammar continues to be a struggle for me, but I have also learned a few mistakes I tend to repeat and can now self-correct them. I look forward to compiling the web folio to showcase the semester’s assignments.
I have attached my Formal proposal Drafts as a PDF and as a Word doc below.