Ideathon was a collaborative learning experience for creating and presenting a research proposal. Working with students from different disciplines highlighted how interdisciplinary research can be leveraged for practical benefits. Each student provided new frameworks to approach the research problem and solutions. Interdisciplinary research can ensure that a project or proposal has considered multiple audiences before development. Our team made sure that we incorporated feedback from every member which improved our process of working together. By integrating different perspectives into a research proposal, I learned the importance of finding the root cause of someone’s feedback and then adding it into the proposal. With each iteration, our team generated more information to strengthen our proposal.

Communication within our team worked well because our member’s willingness to help each other make a better proposal. Having an open discussion about how to solve our research problem helped generate many different approaches to creating a research proposal. I really enjoyed working with everyone while watching the team improve with each meeting. While communication can be difficult at times, overall students did an excellent job at working together to effectively create a research proposal. One way our team overcame this obstacle was asking for everyone’s feedback on a particular direction to guide this particular project. Learning about other students’ skill sets and expertise showed new analytical approaches to our research problem. Our team did their best to communicate and their effort created more well-rounded solutions.

This experience grew my appreciation for each student’s discipline and method of developing ideas. I learned the effectiveness of identifying a specific audience and trying to understand the needs of those individuals. With my own research, I plan on incorporating these concepts in a way that will reach a wider audience. Research makes a larger impact if more individuals can understand the significance of the problem. Ideathon showed that research can draw from multiple disciplines and increase its relevance to other groups of experts. My peers demonstrated different perspectives to approach a research problem and I plan on incorporating those lenses into developing my own research. The entire process was a great way to learn more about how other individuals analyze information and generate solutions. Each analytical strategy that a student used can be treated as a tool to approach my own research problem. I am very appreciative of the time my teammates took in developing this project and the overall experience.