Research Experience: I have little...(?)

My last semester of undergrad I took a Feminist Research Methodology course in the Women's Studies Department. The course focused mostly on ethnography, narrative, and other qualitative research methodologies. As part of the course, I was asked to conduct a test interview and write documents, such as consent forms, as if I were actually conducting a study (and maybe I was sort of conducting a study in that I was finding some truths and learning some stuff, but that is beside the point). The same semester I did some interviews with women who worked with campus media for a small scale research project on representations of women in the media.

I also took a Public Opinion and Propaganda class that required my classmates and I to randomly call numbers from the NMSU phonebook for a poll. We didn't have to do the data magic though, the teacher did that for us. I did get to talk to a lot of angry and confused people, though.

This summer I participated in the Borderlands Writing Project where I learned about conducting teacher research and put together a study I'm hoping to implement in my classroom next semester, IRB and other variables willing.

I haven't been researched, to my knowledge, aside from participating in a newspaper poll once.

My immediate research goals for this class are to draft some kind of research plan with which to approach a thesis (which I am pretty sure I want to do, although I'm a little scared and might actually do the master's essay instead, please don't make me decide right now...). I'm really interested in learning more about ethnography and textual analysis.

At this moment, I am considering applying to PhD programs in Rhetoric, so my longterm research goals are to learn to do research that people will want to read, care about, and pay me for. More specifically, I am interested in doing research within the context of rhetoric/language and bodies and how we use each to socially construct the other. This is a relatively new area of study and I am really excited to get involved. I think research like this can help pave the way for social change and celebration of difference.