Course Reflection

     My semester taking ENC 1102 has been a challenging one for me.  I was nervous from the beginning when hearing about our arduous task of developing a profound, upper level research paper.  All of the research papers I have ever written in the past were on simple subjects, and required no outside research of my own, but simply googling information.  This paper asked me to go out of my comfort zone and really dig deep to find a topic that I was interested in yet could find enough valuable information on to do a lengthy discussion on.  This led me to the topic of Cyber bullying, and the effects social media has had on it.
    
     When I first began to think about the assignment I was so overwhelmed by the thought of it that I began to panic on where to begin.  Fortunately,the assignment was broken into separate sub assignments that made this task much more manageable.  These separate assignments also allowed me to fully comprehend my research topic and I was able to make minor changes to my plan of direction early on in the writing process.  One assignment that helped me immensely was the Research Proposal.  By writing this I was able to give myself more clarity on the topic, and we also proposed the ideas to our Professor and he would in turn gives us tips and advice on how to narrow down or expand your topic.  These assignments allowed me to freely express my ideas and even though they were raw, they still provided some important structure to my paper.
    
     The assignment I believed to help me the most and yet was the most challenging was the Literature Review.  I spent an immense amount of time and effort trying to synthesize different sources and fully comprehend what my sources were saying about this topic.  I also received my best grade on this piece of writing and it really propelled me into conducting my own research.
    
     Much of this paper revolved around synthesizing text and developing ideas on our own, and I struggled with this in the beginning, but became a lot more comfortable with it near the end as demonstrated by my quality grade on the Literature Review.
    
     Being a student in this class has enabled me to fully understand what it takes to write a quality research paper, and also that when handed a difficult monumental task, to break it up into smaller sections and it makes the challenge much more conquerable.