Working on this project was very challenging, but enlightening. The greatest challenge can be summarized by one word: communication. From the early stages, communicating between all of the student group members was rocky. As can be expected, there are difficulties with time commitments or coordinating meeting times. But further than that, it was difficult to reach each other effectively. There were issues with time differences, distance, and digital communication. Nowadays, this is all too familiar. We are becoming quickly acquainted with long-distance collaboration. Teleworking is the new norm. Last summer, it was foreign to me. In this year, I have learned how difficult it can be to encourage urgency and adherence to deadlines when there is no sense of physical accountability. More than the knowledge gained from our research, I am taking away some lessons about work habits. I’ve found that every team is an entirely different animal. The varying combinations of skills, motivations, and experience make for wholly different productions.
I feel that I improved my interviewing and data collection skills in the course of this project. I conducted most of the data collection on my own. It can be very nerve-wracking to approach a person and put them and yourself in an unfamiliar social circumstance. There is a lot of vulnerability in ethnographic research – the fear of rejection, the discomfort with formal interviewing, and the pressure to improvise questioning. However, as with all uncomfortable experiences, I believe I grew from it. I am much more comfortable approaching people. I find that I can always fall back on my ethnographic interviewing skills when in an awkward conversation in daily life. The most useful lesson taken away from this project: people love to talk about themselves. Further, most people are willing to share massive amounts of information when told that you are a college student conducting research. Holding a clipboard is another excellent shortcut to authority.
This was also a lesson in self-direction. In future projects, I will create much more scaffolding and structure to my work. I am fairly new to collegiate research, and was not capable of handling the freedom this project allowed. Professor Pajo gave us an excellent opportunity to try out new methods and test boundaries, and I do not think I took advantage of that. In the future, I will try to be more proactive about synthesizing our collected data in a meaningful way. Overall, this program was a fantastic learning experience. My future research will be better for having done this project and completing this program.