This week I wish I did much more than I actually did! I got a good amount done, but it always feels like there’s infinitely more to do. I got on a great workflow and completed a lot of the qualitative analysis for my posts based on Afzalan et al. (2015)’s article that has a […]
ENVS 400: Capstone
These posts contain my thoughts and reflections throughout the two semester process of researching, writing, and creating my capstone.
“Research is Not a Well-Oiled Machine”
The title of this post is a wise paraphrase of something Liz said last week that really resonated with me. Research isn’t a well-oiled machine, and it’s not streamlined or aerodynamic. It is clunky, inefficient, and slow. I’ve been feeling that a lot this week, as I’ve been trudging through a lot of literature on […]
Benevolence, Integrity, and Judgement: The Seeds of Trust
These past two weeks, I’ve immersed myself in literature about building trust and the role of social capital in disaster preparedness. I found some really useful articles that helped me refine my methodologies to produce clearer results. Through Porter et al. (2008)’s analysis of building trust in firm-sponsored virtual communities, I was able to split my […]
At a Crossroads: How I decided on an Alternative Outcome
From fairly early on, the alternative outcome track has been on my mind. I’m a very visual person who likes tangible results, and an alternative outcome always seemed like it could fulfill those criteria more than a thesis could — that’s one reason I decided to forego an honors thesis. Although a traditional thesis fits […]
How to Build a Resilient Community in 5 Pages
Our task this week was to write a 5 page thesis as a way to determine the most important components and ideas of our argument. In an attempt to have complete data for this, these past few weeks I’ve been logging posts from Portland’s “snowpocalypse” that happened over winter break. I’m using this as a case […]
Bare Branches: A Brief Outline
Today’s assignment was to create an outline for our 5 page thesis due next week. Approaching this assignment was an interesting exercise for me since we’ve already written a final synthesis and a full length outline. Last time my outline was way too long — so this time I tried to vastly simplify it since […]