Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry

One goal of IAS students is to develop their ability to assess and conduct interdisciplinary research by engaging with and across multiple areas of knowledge and kinds of inquiry. They learn to think critically and creatively as they develop research questions, pursue them with appropriate sources and methods, and present results in a form suited to their purpose and intended audience. In this process, they learn to position their own work in relation to other research literatures and methods of inquiry, and in relation to relevant debates and diverse social contexts. One assignment that stands out to me is my research paper for BES 301 Scientific Methods class.

This is a research paper looking at freshwater vertebrates in the Paleocene and Eocene. This paper being the main focus of my BES 301 Scientific Methods course was a very thought out paper in which I expanded my interdisciplinary research and critical thinking skills immensely. This was my first formal research paper I have written I took me the majority of the quarter to work through. For this paper I worked with data in excel to perform statistical analyses as well as performed interdisciplinary research to learn and compare my data to the work of experts in the field to make connections to my claims. For this paper I had to develop and pursue a research question working with a database and an array of sources.