My name is Graeme, and I’m a second year English and
Professional Writing student in the Institutional Communications stream. My
plan is to bring the skills I learn here at York to the world of non-profit
wildlife conservation, performing communications, business writing, and reports
for the World Wildlife Fund or a similar organization. As you can likely infer,
I’m interested in environmentalism and animal protection, but as I lack the
mind to study the sciences I hope to contribute to these causes using my
(likely over-inflated) skills as a wordsmith. Any research I perform in the
business world will hopefully be to do with this discipline, but that is not to
say I will necessarily take my WRIT 2300 project in that direction.
Seguing into my relationship with research, it occurred to
me after Professor Bell’s lecture on January 7th that I perform
research every day in very small ways. As an internet junkie, I spend a disgusting
amount of time watching Youtube videos, Googling trivial subjects, and looking
up celebrities on IMDB.com. Whether or
not the information I glean through these processes is worth the time devoted
to them is debatable, but the fact remains that I act in the pursuit of
knowledge. In academic settings I’ve obviously made use of the typical resources
such as texts in the library and internet databases like Jstor. I don’t,
however, consider myself a gifted researcher, though the use of programs like
RefWorks or Zotero could be beneficial to this project, and projects in the
future. My hope is that, upon completion of this course, I will have developed
a more organized way of going about research, potentially with the help of
these programs, and that my processes will become systematic rather than random
and erratic.
Short of a few small projects in junior high drama classes,
I have no personal experience with radio work, and certainly not with podcasts.
I have to confess that I had never listened to a podcast before this week, and while
I’m excited about undertaking this project, I feel dangerously unfamiliar with
the form. As I progress over the coming weeks, I will have to allow time to
familiarize myself with the technology, which may be just as important to my development
as the research itself. This, however, does not discourage me, and I’m anxious
to sink my teeth into this challenge. As I mentioned, I’ve had very little time
to listen to podcasts, but from the list on the Moodle site, I am most
interested in “Stuff You Missed in History Class.” The term “History” refers to
anything that has happened, whether it was yesterday or two thousand years ago,
and it will be interesting to zero in on a very specific event and uncover a
previously undisclosed story around it. I don’t have any specific ideas as I
write this post, and I have relatively little time to explore before some
decisions will have to be made, but I’m optimistic about the opportunity the
project represents for me.
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