Field Notes
I am doing my research project with Tor on how physical exercise affects academic comprehension. We are conducting surveys on how students around campus are personally affected by this. Most of our completed surveys have been done online however, I had a few in person encounters. The most memorable one was when I was walking back to my dorm after a class. I was about 30 seconds away from my dorm when I spotted the head Fairhaven RAs. I very awkwardly asked him if he would fill out my survey pleading my case that it would only take a minute. Proceeding to me frantically ripping my folder out of my backpack and handing him the paper and a pencil. It was just a very awkward and polite talk from then one but towards the end he turned out to be a super chill guy. I know crazy story but in my defense after putting our survey on the WWU incoming freshman page we got like 82 online responses. Thus in person interactions were not needed and no crazy stories commenced.
This project has gone very well so far. As I said before Tor has been my partner throughout and been a great one at that. The beginning was a little rough solely for the reason that we couldn’t decide on a final research topic. Ultimately narrowing it down from 4 choices to the positive or negative effect of rigorous exercise on reading comprehension. We ran into the problem of having to small of a sample size at first with not an incredible amount of Western students rigorous exercisers. We then had to change the reading comprehension aspect of our central question because there was no true way to test it. We then had to try and get our survey out to as many WWU students as possible. We put it on the canvas link along with the other English students. After doing so we got a good amount of responses along with some of our friends we were off to a good start. Then I copied and pasted a link to our survey on both my soccer and flag football snap chat group chats and got a lot more responses. We still hasn’t hit our objective of 70 responses however. Tor then asked me to try and use my Facebook account to post the link on the incoming freshman page which after doing so shot us up to 82 responses.