My original hope for my senior project was to go out into the wild collect a tree, and create a full bonsai tree from it, a process called yamadori. This task, while something I quickly realized would not in any way whatsoever be possible to complete in the time frame I had, was the foundation for what my senior project morphed into. My final piece of work, instead of a tree, is a research paper, something that still shows the research and experiential learning I had to accomplish, without the many years of work a yamadori entails. This is not to say that I didn't begin the process of creating my own bonsai, and through doing so I was able to learn valuable information I included in my final paper.
The in field research aspect of my project is where I performed the strongest. With this project being in a discipline I was already beginning to educate myself on, it never felt like something that I needed to do, rather an activity outside of school that I was able to tie into my academics. Working with trees you have to follow their schedules, re-potting and responding to parasites on your trees isn't something you can push of for a few months, so the somewhat harsh, imposed deadlines didn't give me a chance to procrastinate, making sure I was always learning about the needs and habits of my trees.
The research paper was somewhat difficult to begin the process of creating. It was first going to be a booklet on how to start your own bonsai, but I felt like that didn't fit well with the learning I was actually doing. I also felt like a guide was very insincere, seeing as I myself was just learning the things I would be guiding others on, and I wasn't in a place to do that yet with the knowledge and experience that I had. Once I did settle on what I was going to write about, the process felt somewhat smooth, although by the nature of what I was writing, I was starting with the aspects I was less familiar with. The pure botany aspects of my paper took a lot more on the spot research than my bonsai section did, and was much slower to create. I don't think that means it is worse, I was just not as prepared, and had to do more citing and quoting of different sources in order to finish that section. The bonsai section was much smoother to create as most of what I was talking about I had been practicing or experiencing with my trees throughout working on my senior project. This caused the problem of not having enough specific material to cite and then having to go back and find articles and other sources supporting my claims. This aspect of my senior project was easier to push back to the last minute, and, I definitely took advantage of that fact. I don't think I pushed it so much to the last minute that it had a drastic effect on the contents of the paper, but I did has some trouble keeping it on schedule.
Documentation of my process is the area that I felt the weakest in. Seeing as this project was something I was, to some extent, doing for personal pleasure before it even started, that made it hard for me to develop the habit of if I was working on a tree, quickly writing that down in my learning journal, or taking photographic evidence. Without having any close deadlines, it was easy for me to either tell myself I would journal later, or it would slip my mind entirely. I did a better job at taking notes (if not almost unreadable ones) of meeting with my outside senior project advisor, seeing as the information I was getting was beneficial for my trees, and that was an easy way of storing that information for further use.