The senior seminar for anthropology majors requires completing and reporting an original ethnographic research project. Although COVID-19 prevented me from doing a highly interactive study, I was still able to research something I was really interested in: inequality in visitation to national parks. I did an extensive literature review, analyzed and interpreted 300 Instagram photos featuring people in the outdoors, applied anthropological theory, and produced a final paper. At twenty pages, it’s the longest paper I’ve ever turned in, and I think it displays my development in this genre. I think what I do well in this paper is not just reporting my own data, but showing why that data is important for the future of diversity and inclusion in outdoor spaces. Making research meaningful is one of the biggest challenges I have faced while writing research papers, so I had a big sense of accomplishment after being able to relate this academic study to my personal interests and aspirations.

For my final paper for my Global Justice and Human Rights in Latin America class senior year, I was asked to write a human rights research report that presented a specific pertinent human rights issue and proposed solutions. I chose to focus on the Mapuche, an indigenous group in Chile, and their fight for land and resource rights. This was a challenging paper to write, mostly because it required learning a new genre and integrating it with an anthropological perspective. In many ways, my writing form and style are different here than in a typical analytical research paper: I start with an “executive summary,” list my recommendations in bullet points, use stronger, persuasive language, and juggle several anthropological and human rights frameworks throughout. This exposed me to a different way of presenting research and I started to understand how research reports could function in the “real world.” I also realized how I could apply my anthropological knowledge to writing in other contexts, which is useful as I transition to writing in public and professional spheres.

For my ANT 327 course, I was required to write several response papers that focused on one of the ethnographies we read during the semester. This essay, responding to Sean Brotherton's book Revolutionary Medicine, shows my growing competency within the discipline of anthropology. I was able to analyze an ethnographic text and take a critical view of it, keeping anthropological theories in mind. It also shows my development in terms of risk-taking and originality. I didn’t merely just reiterate what Brotherton argues in his book, but I did something new with it. I wrote with a confident voice, but I took time to recognize the nuances of my argument and counter arguments. While this was a difficult essay to write, I learned a lot about the course material by writing it and developed my analytical essay-writing in the process.

When I was studying abroad in Chile in the spring of my sophomore year, I took the opportunity to do my own independent research study for anthropology. I investigated the impact of ecotourism on local Chilean communities. In order to do so, I made connections with people involved with ecotourism there and conducted a series of ethnographic interviews. I combined my qualitative data with background literature and existing anthropological frameworks to write a final research paper. Looking back, I really had no idea what I was doing with this research or with the paper – as a sophomore, I had never taken an ethnographic research methods class and I had never conducted fieldwork. As I wrote this paper, I was still learning the genre. As a result, it lacks some depth and polish. However, through the process of doing the research and asking my professor a lot of questions, I did a great deal of learning about the discipline and communicating research. This project provided a good foundation of experience that I built on as I designed other ethnographic research projects my junior and senior years.