Metacognative Reflection
My underlying motivations for Writing Project 2 was my own personal passions, my family background, and my success in the course I am currently taking: ESS 3: Nutrition and Health. This project was a research paper but the thing that was unique about this was I was choosing what I wanted to research. I had a research problem, I had a rationale for wanting to investigate, and I had a personal stake in this writing project. There were new territories I explored with this project but there were also territories that I had been to before and am comfortable with. For instance, doing my own primary research was something that I wasn’t used to. I was used to my teachers telling me what to investigate and where my limits were with a certain research prompt. However, something different about conducting your own research is you make your own prompt and make it something that you actually take interest in.
Having a rationale for doing your research makes your writing so much more richer because of the fact that you take a personal stake in it. According to Olivas, she found that her students could synthesize information at a deeper level when they find a personal stake in their research questions and they could explore themselves better, as well (11). There is a tendency to better understand your research when it is something personal to you because you care more about your research and really want to find some real answers to the question at hand. Olivas found that many of her students wanted to continue researching and get a better understanding beyond just their research paper (11). When you care about your research even beyond the writing assignment, that is when you have the question is personal to you and leads to deeper understandings as you continue to want to investigate even after research paper is done. I saw this idea as a parallel to Oliva’s title of “Cupping the Spark” because the research you do should spark curiosity since it's a topic that matters to you and you want to research further into the matter simply because you are that interested. I felt like I had this personal stake that I described above in my own research question.
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The topic I chose was something that I am currently invested in and find particularly interesting and pertainable to my life. Nutrition and Health has always been something found important because I have a passion for helping other people. In my own life, health is an important thing that I care about and that my family cares about. I think that is why this research project had another aspect to it that made me want to investigate further. My family values eating healthy and values being healthy and strong people. So, in doing this project I hoped to find some conclusion about students in college and the health issues that they deal with. If this community of people can better their health by simple things like eating better, exercising, and quitting smoking, it can impact the future generations as well. This aspect of having a positive ripple effect fascinated me and I really enjoyed putting this project together. It took lots of reflection and observation of teaching assistants and the professor for ESS 3: Nutrition and Health. The professor’s motivations of having her students really just take away something positive for their health (even if it’s just smiling more often) directly related to my own motivations for investigating into the health of college students.
Writing Project 2 required of me to visit skills that I had also learned in the fall in my anthropology class. This writing project required me to complete a proposal, conduct an interview, conduct observations, and analyze a scholarly journal. All of these methods came together to make up my research project on the health issues that college students deal with. Observation, however, was something that I had done in my Anthropology 2 class. We wrote an ethnographic research paper about the drought in California and how it affected a certain community of people. I had to observe these communities of people and in order to do that I had to know exactly how and what the act of observation included. I learned how to take jottings of an environment and the people in it. From there, I was able to code it and make sense of it as it pertained to my research question. I used this knowledge of observation to be able to transfer it to this research paper for Writing 2. Two different disciplines, and I was able to use the information I learned not to long ago to help me answer my research question for this writing project.