Reflection
When I first entered this class, I was full of anxiety and terrified to speak with any of my peers, let alone work with them. And almost immediately, we were cordoned off into groups and assigned collaborative group work. That first day, I had thought that I was going to hate the class all semester. Rather quickly, however, my fears were alleviated. The group work wasn't so bad, after all. My peers were friendly and most of them just as shy of other people as I am. The anxiety subsided.
I enjoyed being given the chance to explore a topic of my own choosing and spend a large large amount of time exploring it with the justification of it being for an assignment. It's an opportunity that rarely comes along in an undergrad. Pluswhich, going through the step by step process of building a research paper did help me figure out what methods work best for me and what methods just didn't click. I found a workflow that suited me.
And of course, Professor Norris is just an excellent human being. I found him genuinely funny and relatable, and I appreciated the professional interest and concern he showed me and other students regarding not only our chosen research topics, but also events in our personal lives and the impact those events had on our academic lives. Hopefully he wasn't bored out of his mind by my paper on whales!