Dale’s Unit Two Reflection Blog
Overall, unit two was challenging and enjoyable from both a “thinking” and “writing” perspective. The brainstorming process in particular took quite a bit of iterative thought. Working remotely and not having been on campus much over the past two years meant that my exposure to different communities and organizations was limited and mainly online, which didn’t feel like an exciting premise for a research paper. I also wanted to make sure that my subject would lend itself well to both first- and second-hand research, be something that I had familiarity and access to, and perhaps most importantly be something that could help solve a real problem. My thinking focussed on something to do with COVID’s impact on the working world, and my eureka moment came when speaking to a co-worker about our company’s upcoming lease renewal. Once I decided on using my research paper to explore OP Media’s options for its office space and the challenges of in-office vs working from home and hybrid, the research proposal came together intuitively.
For the section on LinkedIn best practices, I have had a profile on that site for several years so I was already familiar with many of the ideas I found in my research. However, after conducting my research and then looking at my site, I realized that there were definitely some areas for improvement, in particular in the wording in which I presented my accomplishments (use more specificity, for example), and my lack of interaction with other people on the site.
Once again, my partner’s peer review proved to be useful when editing my proposal and refining it in the outline and progress report. Specifically, Harvey had some great points about explaining why the company couldn’t just continue on as-is, as well as fleshing out details that weren’t clear. Since I have a fairly well-formed idea of how I want to construct and research my paper, I found the progress report to be straight forward with the exception of the creation of the survey. Not having created a survey or used the survey software before, I found it challenging to put questions together in such a way that they both made sense individually, built on each other, and minimized redundancy. My first draft was not successful, but I took the feedback I received and made what I think are nice improvements. I did, however, run into a significant issue with my survey link not updating after I publish it so I’m hoping that will be resolved quickly.
Dale’s revised proposal can be found here.
Harvey’s feedback on my proposal can be found here.