Have a Great Summer!

Hey everyone!

First off, I would like to say thank you and that I really appreciated getting to know you all over the past semester. The integration of the ePortfolio experience into this class really helped make that possible! Not to mention, I did not realize how many people that I share other classes with! So needless to say, this is a great networking tool. Until using it this semester, I did not realize that there was a forum on the internet for professional networking that allows the user to publish samples of their work.

This was my very first time using the ePortfolio and boy did I have a learning curve! It was a bit difficult at first, but once I used a few tutorials and Dr. Beck’s instructions I was able to navigate my way through editing like a pro. Having learned the importance of the professional networking aspect (as discussed above) I would definitely say that ePortfolio has a place in helping me achieve my future goals.

I am going to be an Officer in the United States Navy once I graduate from Old Dominion University. That career is built upon professional and social connections. The ePortfolio offers a chance to merge these two worlds. Take this for example, my ePortfolio is filled with my academic work and once I link it to either my Facebook page or LinkedIn account then it will be accessible to everyone that I have established a relationship with via social media. There are a lot of things that I plan to add to my ePortfolio. The most important document that I will be adding, is my updated resume and my sociology capstone research project. Having this information available to the masses on my ePortfolio is going to be invaluable!

I really enjoyed being in this research class. I think my favorite part was getting to conduct a study. I am a very inquisitive person and I like to observe and analyze life as it happens around me. So I really enjoyed having the opportunity to create an experimental design centered on a research question that I am passionate about. Looking back, I think I would try to mainstream my hypothesis. There was so much information that I wanted to gather during my experiment that I felt rushed and constricted to the page limit. By taking a more honed approach to the experiment, I would have an opportunity to better examine the participants and data. The most valuable part of this experience has been learning how to decipher data. Historically, I would skip over the data section of journal articles because I did not understand what I was reading. Since learning how to read the data and understanding what each test is designed for, I can now read and interpret journal articles like never before. This has translated into a more robust experience during the research process.

I would really like to thank everyone again for the past semester, especially Dr. Beck! This has been an awesome class! Have a great summer everyone!