Week of 04/14

This week we got our report drafts back and realized that everybody has a lot of work to do on their introductions, abstracts, and especially discussions. My group had difficulty getting a good discussion or analysis of our data because some of the stats for some response variables had not been run correctly or completely and so we had to wait for that information before we could start a discussion. I tried to find some good research articles for all of us to use and posted them in our group's folder on Blackboard. Unfortunately, only about half of the few that I posted will be worth much. It is difficult to find literature that looks at hydrology, vegetation, and aquatic macroinvertebrates. I found a lot of articles (or at least it felt like I did) on birds and vegetation in wetlands and connecting those two together. It was frustrating, but also interesting to see the direct connections between the projects of all of us in the class. This was later reinforced on Friday when we worked on our diagram.

Class Wednesday was very productive. Although I had heard some of the information before, it was really good for me to hear it again and have it reinforced and I also learned a few new things about abstracts. Our final report has a lot of work left on it before we will be in good shape. Dr. Entrekin mentioned several times the importance of the topic sentence and I couldn't agree more. After working with Dr. Larson on my thesis, I really had that ingrained in me. If I learned anything from that thesis, it was how to write a topic sentence. It's how I write everything now. I start with the topic sentences of paragraphs where I want to discuss various aspects of a topic. After I have my topic sentences, I find my collected literature and put the sources under the topic sentences and then go back to those sources and fill in the paragraphs. Finding sources is the most time-consuming part of that process and the most difficult part is writing the topic sentence. It's definitely a valuable tool.

Wednesday and Thursday we worked more on our presentation using Google drive again. Alyson worked with me in the GIS lab to put it together and Ali worked from home on it. I think overall it wasn't a bad first draft, but we realized that we definitely have some parts to work on (discussion!). Presenting and critiquing our own and each other's presentations on Friday was also highly productive. I know I definitely have direction on where to go not only on our presentation, but on the paper to improve it. Alyson worked on the presentation some last night. I aim to work on the paper this weekend and next week and then add Monday/Tuesday add in my slides so that I have time to practice them and edit them before we present again on Wednesday. Overall, it was another highly productive week!