Proposal Feedback

Some feedback I received on my research proposal was to continue to shape my research question and perhaps look into other questions that can help develop my research question. Overall I received good feedback stating that the topic was very interesting and that my professor was excited to see where my research project is going. Another feedback that I received was to explore some of the gender disparities in institutionalization and why do they exist. This question will also help me develop and narrow down my research question to write my paper. In my feedback, I also received a name of an author who's work can help me explore how "madness" is constructed for women. The last feedback that I received was to look at the story of Nellie Bly, girl stunt reporter who went undercover in an insane asylum, and explore why the Victorian discussion concerning madness and women exists. Some questions that I have about scholarly research is how do I know if an article that I found on a database is a reliable source to use in my research paper. I feel like its hard to tell what is useful in an article when I'm researching.

Reflective Essay

    When thinking about research questions, my ideas were all over the board. I couldn't decide what to do my essay on until I took some time to focus on a question that was really interesting to me, instead of looking at something that was just as scholarly but boring. I am very interested in the treatment of women in mental institutions and knew that this topic would somehow lead me to my research question. After looking at some Wikipedia articles on the treatment of women in mental institutions and a few journal entries of women journalists who faked crazy to get into these institutions, I generated my first research question that involved looking into the treatment of women in mental institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries along with sterilization and the Eugenics movement, and looking at these women journalists I mentioned earlier. I realized that this was way too broad and almost impossible to write one research paper on all of these subjects because they were sufficient research questions all on their own. I decided to narrow it down and focus solely on the women journalists who sacrificed their normal everyday lives to live in mental institutions and see how the conditions really were. It was difficult to narrow my research question down, but as I had mentioned earlier, my first research question was way too in depth and involved too many topics. I narrowed my question down by looking at what really interested me and decided that the brave women journalists were the way to go. I have had a few challenges while researching this question, mainly due to the fact that I haven't found very many credible sources on the internet. I have mainly been using search engines like Google and I am hoping that I will find more when we use actual research databases. My first sources that I used were journal entries and interviews of two women who got admitted to mental institutions on purpose even thought they were decades apart from one another. I really liked this approach at looking at and reading their personal experiences because it is easier for the readers and me to put ourselves in their shoes and see what their experiences were really like.
     My first face-to-face conference really made me realize that my first research question was way too broad. I went in there feeling good about my research proposal essay and thought I had done everything right, but I came out crushed to realize that I would have to scrap a lot of my essay and narrow it down to one topic. My peers were very helpful in helping me decide what research question to pursue because they were all very interested in the stories of the women journalists. The feedback I found most useful was to narrow it down, which everyone wrote on my paper as advice. If I hadn't been told this, I would run into trouble and be completely overwhelmed later on by the magnitude of all things I was trying to take on.
     I believe that my work in class has been consistently above average but by no means perfect. I feel that I take a lot of time on my essays and try to answer the questions we have been given thoroughly. I'm not quite sure what my work folder reveals about me. Maybe it shows my time and effort spent on writing my essays and how I have come to develop my ideas. I feel that my work folder might not show who I am as a writer because I feel that my essays aren't as consistent and correlating as I would like them to be.