My third roommate just opened up her mission call. THANK GOODNESS I am going to Africa or else I would feel very abandoned and alone here in Provo with my girls on missions. Maddie, heading to Latvia any day now, Erica goes into the MTC and then to Russia just 5 days before I leave, and Carley is entering the MTC on August 8 to go to the Alpine Germany mission. A Latvian, Russian, and German... I feel like the odd ball out but boy do I love Africa. I have been thinking a lot about the Field Studies program this week and how grateful I am for it. Without it I would not be able to do the research I am doing. I would not be able to go where I am going. I would not be able to live out this dream. I recently heard that the Kennedy Center is doing away with Field Studies. I do not know all the reasons behind this but I do know that it is a very unfortunate thing. It makes me sad to think that I might not have had the opportunity to do this work. Field Studies is an amazing program that allows students to facilitate their own research and to show themselves how powerful and innovative they can be. I never thought my brain had the capacity to think the things it thinks and to come up with the ideas that it does and it is because of this opportunity that I have been able to learn SO much. Granted, I would have been doing ethnographic research whether or not it was through Field Studies because of my major but I cannot imagine not being able to fulfill this dream I have had since the moment I read 'Ghana' on the list. It is an amazing opportunity. One that allows me to build my own research, one that gives me the opportunity to get my name in the academic community when I publish my research in journals and such. Of course, those are big wishes and fulfillment's but think about how that will look on graduate school applications as opposed to just piggybacking off of a professors research where my name get left behind behind the acknowledgments of the professor, the department, and the university. I may have the wrong idea about how the research would be if Field Studies were not available...which they wont be in the near future...but I guess I am just very grateful that I have been given the opportunity to do this.
In presenting my research today I realized that I need to figure out how to explain my project and my project question to the people in Ghana better than I did today, especially to those who will be participating in my research because when i got nervous I felt myself stumbling over my words and rambling on endlessly. It was all relevant information but I just did not feel like I presented it in best way that I could. I am going to work on that. I also just decided to add a few interviews in the mix of my methods which I hadn't planned to do until today so I will be doing some last minute tweaks. And really the tweaks will never end.
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