Since
our very first day at the OTS office in San José, we’ve been told that everything
we would learn over the semester was going to culminate into an enormous independent
research project, designed, investigated, written and presented by us. None of
us had ever had so much ownership over our work before – we were used to reproducing
assignments for classes at our home universities that had been completed before
by hundreds of past students. Back then, the prospect of having autonomy over
these projects was exciting, but way off – like we were never actually going to
get to the point of doing it.
As
the weeks went on, and La Selva was becoming sooner and sooner, that feeling of
anticipation shifted to feeling overwhelmed. We were gaining experience with
our visiting professors during facultyled projects in Palo Verde and Las Cruces,
realizing how much planning goes into research, and then how those plans are
flipped upside down as soon as you’re in the field, collecting data for
yourself. We learned, very quickly, how statistical analysis can be a little
bit tricky, and that it takes a lot of personal engagement in a project to
motivate you to invest time and energy in it.
Being
asked what I’m interested in and trusted to follow through on that idea is an
experience that came at just the right time for me. My feelings of being
overwhelmed pushed me just far enough out of my comfort zone to motivate me
even more to rise to the challenge. In pitch black, until the early hours of
the morning, we collected and processed data, with the best attitudes I’ve ever
felt for a project. Even through the tricky part of analysis, I owned this
idea, so I was committed to being thorough. I wanted to uncover the literature,
and support my findings with other research – leave no stone unturned. I didn’t
want there to be a single opportunity for my ideas to be misunderstood, so I
had to write more clearly than ever. They were right, on that very first day –
this project was the product of
everything I’d gained over the semester. And I’m really, really proud of it!
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