Reflection #5: Wrapping Up
Throughout the semester we had multiple meetings on Teams with our partner HeartLands Conservancy. During those calls, me and my team would take turns explaining where we were in our research, such as what we want to focus on, how we’re going to collect our data, what the progress of it is, and much more. This was very helpful as it gave us a chance to somewhat “pitch” our idea and hear how it sounds out loud to someone who wasn’t there when you were coming up with it. They would give us feedback as well helping to steer us in a direction that would contribute most to their mission as well as ours.
In addition to that, some more on-site work that I did was the interviews. This required me to be very social as I had to find people to interview and actually ask them the list of questions I came up with. I would say that it wasn’t as nerve-racking as I originally thought it would be, and I definitely believe that it had to do with me interviewing students attending SIUE who were my friends as well as fellow CODES scholars, albeit from different cohorts as mine. Even though this wasn’t the way I wanted it to go at first, it still turned out to be very insightful to my research as all the participants engaged thoroughly with me and my questions.
When it came to working with other people, specifically my group, there were lots of ups and downs. The pros was that we could divide the work so it didn’t fall completely on one person which definitely helped in the long run. Also working in a team allowed for us to have people we could bounce ideas off of and get advice from. However, there are still cons to working with other people such as the fact that you have to depend on them to get their part of the job done in order to continue forward. There wasn’t too much of an issue with that this semester, and that was because our work was mainly individual things that only depended on each person themselves, so there weren’t really any chances for those things to happen. Plus, if it did happen, it didn’t fall on anyone else besides that person.
During this semester, something I learned about myself is that I can be very capable, but I have to push to be in the right conditions to bring my full potential out. There were so many opportunities this semester where I could have achieved much greater things instead of just getting it done. Now, I’m not saying that the work I put out was below par because I still put a lot of effort into everything that I did. However, I know that if I had the time and energy, I could have made good things great, and great things amazing. With that being said, I still will continue moving forward and bettering myself because I was able to take these valuable experiences with me.