Cael’s Journal SC01

First Meeting: Face to Face at UC

This is the second semester of my grad school in MSCS at UC, I am a bit excited to attend because this marks the first time for me to meet my classmates physically. I arrived in class a bit late because a last minute announcement to bring our devices was made so I had to go to my workplace to retrieve my laptop and I had not eaten breakfast so I ate at the work canteen before grabbing a taxi and went straight to UC.

My laptop at my workplace. I was late because of this.

We went to a small room enough for about 10-15 people and had our introductions. Sir Joey introduced himself and so did my classmates and myself. I recall my college days in SLU, I seem to remember sir Joey’s face although he was never my teacher in my undergrad course.

Sir Joey proceeded to introduce us to our textbook and the first chapter. We were introduced to the three approaches of research and we also learned about the worldviews that researchers use to write their paper. The worldviews are straightforward, very broad, and vague as although it describes the views and gives some examples, the extent of the viewpoints were not really discussed in detail.

Later we did an activity reading papers and classifying them according to approach and worldview. I tried as best I could to classify the papers according to the descriptions in the book. There is no feedback from sir Joey so I don’t know if I did the activity correctly.

2nd Meeting: ODL with sir Joey

The second meeting of our subject Methods of Research was ODL. Sir Joey did a short discussion of chapter 2 and had us create a presentation of our assignment of ten related literature.

Creating a presentation for the RRL assignment.

I briefly read chapter 2 of the book and I admit very little of the information made sense to me. There’s a lack of examples given as the discussion revolved around the concept of RRL. It would have been much better if concrete examples were given with explanations on the thought process and goals of the author included.

The activity then proceeded at 10:30 as sir Joey gave us an extension of 30 minutes but failed to notify us of submitting the presentation in canvas so most of us missed the submission requirement deadline and our submissions are already considered late. We presented our related literatures one by one till lunch time.

We ended the day with an assignment of making a proper RRL with twenty articles to be researched including submission of a literature map within a week. There was no feedback from sir Joey regarding the results of the previous activities so I was wondering if I did those things correctly.

3rd Meeting: In Person, Exams, Presentation

So our third meeting was a face to face class at UC. We had our examination first thing in the morning and luckily it didn’t involve any memorization and it was open notes. I really suck at memorizing things so exams like identification and fill in the blanks would kill me.

Next up we presented our literature map to the class. I was the last one to present and luckily I was able to make a good presentation despite not really being able to prepare adequately. I had a planned concept in mind and I was able to execute it perfectly. Sir Joey asked questions during each presentation and gave us some pointers that were very helpful in materializing the research we intended to do.

Sir Joey finally gave us some feedback of our previous activities and we were able to see our scores in some of them. Then to end the day sir gave us a short discussion of the next topics and then gave us some reading assignments.

A layout of my literature map that I presented in class during our 3rd meeting

4th Meeting: ODL Problem Statement and Research Questions

Prior to our 4th meeting, sir Joey gave us an assignment to read chapters 6 and 7 of the book by Creswell and to create our statement of the problem and research questions. Then we presented them in our 4th meeting as sir Joey gave pointers which things to change and what areas to cover.

Later in the morning, sir Joey went over each student’s review of related literature and coached us one by one on which things to improve and change. We did this until lunch time. So far, my review made a couple of mistakes that should be addressed but overall sir Joey gave me pointers in which areas I should focus on and fix.