Research Skills & Interdisciplinary Problem Solving

According to Albert Einstein, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” Whether this is your first UCF class or you last semester, you all have performed some sort of research about some sort of topic and most likely put together some sort of report displaying your findings. As I am ending my undergraduate career (*fingers crossed*), I have come to the realization of the importance of my recent research as well as the basic techniques I learned some time since kindergarten. During my recent graduate school interview I was taken aback when asked what type of research I had been a part of and what type I am interesting in doing in the future. I was not completely prepared for this question but managed to pull some examples from deep in my brain and quickly think about some interesting medical topics I had recently read about in a scientific journal. Research is not something that only scientist do. It is a necessary skill needed to be mastered, one that will likely aid you in graduate school, fighting for a promotion or simply buying car insurance.

Having conducted simple survey based research for a sociology class to forming mock “Health Care Bill” reforms; I can confidently say that UCF has all the tools and resources one will need when setting out to do research. I have learned a lot about research and feel that my techniques have come a long way since my beginner research days. I have found that I typically tend to gather most of my information from limited sources and when I go to do my works cited page, it is surprisingly short. I now force myself to look for a long list of potential sources, whether it is journals, government documents, historical evidence, past research results, published reports or articles – I put together a list of places I want to look into before I even begin the actual looking. I have also adopted a policy of strict organization. Printing the hard copy of an article or website has allowed me to be able to find the necessary information even after time has passed since the first viewing. I have noticed that “bookmarking” websites doesn’t always pan out for me in the end when it comes time to document my sources. Organization is an aspect of researching that I am still in the process of adding to my repertoire, and I must say that it has made the typically long process much more tolerable.

I personally attended some of UCF’s “Research week” events during my freshman year and have found that I still draw on what I learned at a “Beginning research” lecture put on by graduate students. Research week is full of helpful tips and advice regarding grant writing / funding to development of research skills. Interested in graduate school? You can conduct your first bit of research on March 30^th at 12pm with a “What is Graduate School” workshop in the student union. Visit http://www.researchweek.ucf.edu/ to get a detailed schedule of the 2011 Research week events.

I’m sure you’ve all done research for school by now, what is the best research tool you have found? We all know about Google search and Wikipedia, are there some really good websites that you can share? How have you used research in your daily lives? As an Interdisciplinary student, what types of research have you done or hope to do that might help you with future employment?

Consider the questions above and the following video during your responses and remember to sign each of your posts!

Here is a very simple getting started video regarding basic researching