Blog Assignment #10: Research Project Reflection

The most interesting thing about the research experience for me was actually developing our own experiment. Once we had an idea of what we wanted to do we had to research the methods to actually do it and filter through a lot information to find what was useful to us and then decide what we were capable of doing in our time frame. I think that was actually was one of the biggest difficulties, at least for me. Deciding the most effective way to do an experiment like ours was hard. Since soil erosion happens on such a large scale world-wide, composing an controlled, small-scale experiment in one quarter was interesting. But I’m proud of the amount of work we got done and how every time my group met in lab we had a plan about what we needed to get finished!

Something I think I could have improved as a member of the team was time management and communication outside of class because we had so many things to do! But working in groups is always different depending on who it’s with, so it was nice that I had been in groups with Megan and I’m grateful that I think we were a bit familiar with each other’s work styles this time around! Our first trial results were very surprising (and worrisome) to me, when we did the slight rainfall at a 20 degree slope. I really thought we were going to have more soil erosion from that than we got so that made me a bit nervous about the direction of our experiment.

I think I will always remember our class, that’s one of the pros of being such a small number of people, but I like that and it was a really nice group of people! It made it much more interesting when you know your peers better. Before this class and research project I didn’t know much about soil erosion at all so I’ll definitely remember some facts about it in 5 years! I don’t know how in depth I’ll remember the material we covered in class because 5 years would be pretty long to recall some of it, but I hope I remember because out of all the biology classes this one has been my favorite material-wise so far, and I really enjoyed learning about plants.