That is wonderful news, that we have space in eCollege this summer! I worked as an RA throughout my entire doctoral program and it was an invaluable experience. In fact, I worked in research outside of my schooling for many of my graduate years and found that much like statistics, the more you use that part of the brain, the better it gets.
My first area of work was on content about which I had no experience - so I felt a bit detached from it and would have loved to have had a space such as this to regularly connect with my fellow RAs and the Principal Investigator.
I cannot say enough about how valuable research for all of our professional tool kits. When I think about how research is often conducted in brick and mortar institutions both before this electronic era (i.e. research was conducted slower and with potentially less cohesion between RAs and Investigators) and now - with a heavy reliance on social media (i.e. allowing for faster and more cohesive research teams), this classroom space will greatly enhance our students' research experience and seems to be the future for online research.
Amy,
ReplyDeleteI agree, that this experience is valuable. As soon as I read your post, I emailed all current colleagues of mine and about 25 past colleagues that I maintain contact with to tell them to consider participating in this project. I think it is important for students to communicate to other students valuable experiences that they should also consider. The thing is, this is often hard to do beyond telling current colleagues (those with whom a student is currently in a class with). I started years ago down-loading names and emails of students so that for various reasons I could alert them to opportunities or ask them if they knew about opportunities. I have heard many times that fellow students appreciate this, but there is no expidited way to make this happen. You might should consider a chat room on this site or a comment tab that past researchers could use to tell students who are considering this what they thought about paticipating and how they enjoyed it, etc.
Mavis
Hi Mavis,
ReplyDeleteFantastic! You are showing how invaluable graduate students are to one another and I could not agree more. I only had one peer/one classmate in my particular graduate program and boy, did we come to count on each other and are still friends to this day.
I will keep your suggestions about forming a chat room, etc... in mind should the right opportunity present itself.
Thanks for your comment ;-)