Coming into BCM 212, I didn’t know what to expect. Understanding research practice? It didn’t sound too complicated to me. Within the first few weeks where we had to come up with a question to focus our research on, based on student experience, I was a bit stuck with ideas. Thinking about negative experiences that Uni students could encounter, I immediately thought about the parking problems. However, I know this is a major issue and that this would be the focal point of many people’s projects I assumed.. So I decided not to go with it, also because it doesn’t affect me. But, knowing two international students already, I knew that this was something I was curious about. In particular, how their experience differs compared to domestic students. This was something I wanted to look into further.
So the research began, and I found that there was lots of information on it, making it a convincing topic to delve into. Conducting my own research wasn’t too bad at first, however, it was difficult to receive responses from our BCM 212 students which was surprising. I expected to obtain a lot more feedback as everyone is in the same situation and needs data for their own projects. In saying that, I expected that waiting for results was going to be a timely process, and this proved me right. Where initially, I only wanted to wait one week to get responses but I had to extend that time further. Next time, I would reach out to more people, perhaps through emails.
When it came to putting the data together and translating it into my reflective portfolio, I found that there were some gaps when it came to comparing the domestic and international students’ experiences, due to not having enough specific questions. Questions that I should’ve included would be ones about how individuals adapt to the difficulties they face at University, if they know about services they can utilise around the campus, if they use them, etc.
Although I didn’t get much information from international students, it was interesting to see how domestic students view international students’ adjustment to Uni. Overall, this project was very similar to one I’ve done previously in high school (the IRP), so the way in which research was conducted is the same and it’s always interesting to gain a deeper understanding about a topic you want to know more about.
mandycai8 