Blog Post #5 – Saving yourself trouble D.S.
David S -
What advice would you give to BASIS juniors about choosing their senior projects, based on your own experiences?
Some advice I would give to a BASIS junior would be that they need to focus on their project and get it done right from the very beginning. If you plan poorly from the beginning and do not give your project too much attention, it will fail later on, or you will not receive the results necessary for proper analysis and synthesis.
You must also choose a method that is feasible and will give you quality results to use. When choosing a method for your experiment, you should explore all the options that you have that can help your experiment. However, some options, like questionnaires or surveys, may seem more difficult to implement and receive proper data from. But, if you dedicate your time to your project and make a proper questionnaire that has useful questions that can help you with whatever question you may be answering. If you do not spend a lot of time and make a questionnaire that has no reason and useless questions, then you will not be able to make any connections or conclusions for your final paper.
Choose something that you are comfortable researching on. If you hear many of the people around you researching some bacteria that you have never heard about before, you must not be intimidated and force yourself to do something that you cannot grasp the idea of. This does not mean do not do anything outside of your comfort zone. Research is meant to make you explore. Just pick a project that you know you will be able to go through with and write papers on, and make a long presentation on.
Lastly, pick a topic that you like. Picking a topic that you like or that interests you will make the research that much easier. If you are doing a project you do not like, you will never want to do any further research on it, and it will make you drag along with your project. This will result in you either not finishing the project or finishing it with poor quality. You do not want to finish your project only because you have to, but you want to have worthwhile information so that your time over the last 6+ months has not been wasted.
Overall, spending time and energy on your project is the most important thing. You must dedicate time in order to receive quality results and make your experiment official.
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