As I do more work in my fields and develop my research project and goals further, I think I can get blinded by my own passion and get away from understanding how my research can fit into others’ fields or work as well. With so many important projects coming from so many distinct fields in the Brackenridge fellowship, I want to build those interdisciplinary connections, which will hopefully help develop not only my specific research now but also the way I’ll think about research in the future. 

While I think my project and attention on what’s expected and taught in professional communication could be important for not only researchers but also students across fields, it’s up to me to demonstrate that importance by highlighting specific parts of my project most related to professional writing and its current (perhaps assumed) definition. Through this fellowship, I hope to talk with other student researchers so I can better understand what they may find most intriguing or important in my research. With this knowledge, I could develop further projects, emphasize those parts of my research, or just better understand what audience I’m writing to for specific research outcomes and what audience(s) may want out of the specific outcome. In terms of developing my research skills in a more long-term sense, I think this work discovering and developing more ways of looking at my project and shaping it to different audiences for different purposes will be important to better understand the work I do and why. 

In the past few weeks, as we’ve discussed the fundamentals of research and I’ve spent time thinking about the type of research I’m doing, I’ve found just how much many of our projects can connect. Even when we have the same methods, such as interviewing, it can be easy to separate these into different types of interviews for different purposes. But at the end of the day, many of our projects contain many of the same methods, if not also be based around similar principles. On the other side of this, even with similar designs we could be searching for different things or taking basic methods and using them differently. As I try to make sense of research methods and discover which ones work for me and my projects, I’ll value the chance to see how other people approach and use similar methods, what data they generate for their work, and how they use this data to produce whatever research outcome they are aiming for. 

Overall, while I am excited to talk with people across disciplines to learn about their projects, discuss key takeaways and what’s important in our research, and learn about research methods by watching other researchers throughout the summer, I’m sure there will be obstacles in these endeavors. I’m certainly still trying to do research in my own field all while trying to be interdisciplinary, which creates more obstacles on the leaning curve. Many of us also may have different vocabulary that may seem difficult to translate or fully express without more background knowledge. But I do think that these difficulties will also add more content to the field of research and what it’s like to be an interdisciplinary research, which is always valuable as well.