Blog Assignment #10: Research Project Reflection

When my group began working on our project it was very stressful to begin planning and designing a project that we were all interested in. It was also difficult to determine and agree on what was reasonable within our abilities and the time that we had. It also seemed that it was overwhelming to brainstorm topics when we had so much freedom in choosing what we wanted to work on. In most of our past experiences we had been given a topic, guidelines or limitations for what we were expected to test. Now that we completed our research project, I'm grateful that we had the opportunity to study something that my group found interesting and that taught us all a lot about an area we were not very familiar with. 

I'm proud of the fact that we overcame struggles, such as inconsistencies in technique and unexpected results due to error, as a team, and that we were able to become stronger scientists by learning from our errors and failures. I'm also proud of how we all had different strengths and personalities which contributed to the overall process and made us more efficient and precise as a group as we continued forward with our work. Regardless, I do believe that I could have done further research to better understand the cause of our errors which would have allowed us to make adjustments to our method sooner.

I found it surprising how well our method and approach worked considering most of us hadn't taken a microbiology course. The end result and having a poster as a visual of how it all came together was very fulfilling and exciting. I know I will look back on it as my first experience going through the entire scientific process and feeling accomplished and proud of the outcome.