The Proposal +

The proposal was not a surprise but definitely not what I was expecting. Who knew that making a proposal would  take so many tries? For those of you who are not in my CWRR class I am not talking about a marriage proposal but a topic proposal for my research project.

The proposal is where we formally propose our topics to our teacher. The requirements were as follows: "The text should focus on the general environmental issue, along with a research question and/or hypothesis on local issues." After reading it you are probably thinking pshh that's easy. That's what I thought until I had to sit down and write.

 I am planning on doing my research paper on how solar panels will lower the amount of energy and money a college campus spends each year. So when I sat down to write my proposal that is what I started with. Then I had to think, am I talking about putting solar panels on all the buildings on campus or just on certain buildings. I was thinking more so for just the dorms so I had to include that. After that, I had to think about how adding solar panels to the dorms are going to help the environment. By using solar panels the dorms will be using solar energy instead of burning coal to supply power to the building which reduces the amount of fossil fuels being burned and released into the environment. I also noted that because switching to solar panels would save the more money the school could charge less for tuition or put the extra money toward other improvements that the school may need.

Gathering all my main points for the proposal was hard enough then I actually had to type it out. It took me three tries to get it to sound like what I wanted it to and I still did not like the end result. However making the bibliography was not as difficult. Even though we had to have quite a few sources, it was easier because we didn't necessarily have to read them before we listed them as a source we may need for our paper. At first I struggled because I was not exactly sure where to start looking. I started out by typing out my topic in the google browser and seeing what articles popped up. There were quite a few but not as many as what was required. During the next class period I asked my professor how to use the school database to look up different articles. So he took us through how to use the schools library database to look up articles and journals that would be helpful to our topic. After learning how to use the database it did not take me long to figure out which sources I thought would be relevant to my research topic.

The Thursday before our proposal was due, our research librarian came in and gave us a lesson on how to use the database as well. Although our professor showed us it was good to have refresher for the weekend and future research that needed to be done.