Directed Research: conquered!
After three agonizing months of research pretty much without any help whatsoever, I have finally finished the first draft of my Directed Research paper, which is 6 credits of my semester in the past tense. HOO-rah, as Caitlin would say.
This concentration, which is called Directed Research, was basically research without any direction whatsoever. We were given practically no help in selecting a topic-- and when I wanted to try and narrow down my topic from the broad category of "all things microfinance," I was actively discouraged from pursuing microfinance at all, because not only my advisor, but the person she sent me to in the Ministry of Economics, decided (without having looked into it for even a second!) that there just wouldn't be any information available at all with regard to microfinance, and I might as well just not even bother. Long story short, I bothered. I bothered my way into 28 pages' worth of research paper, without further useful advice from the advisor, because she had none to give. She's not an economist, I can appreciate that, fine. She's a sociologist, advising twenty people's research papers on a wide array of topics; I don't expect her to have stunning insight into every nuance of every paper. But the least she could have done is have suggestions for places I could go, or people I could talk to, or helped me in organizing my thoughts into the structure of the paper, or done anything except discourage me from making a truly academic study of microfinance in Argentina, which is what I wanted to do. These 28 pages are not academic research; they cannot be entered into research competitions in the States or used as part of a thesis (which is what we were promised as to the quality of our final product); and the reason why nobody doing Directed Research this semester was able to come up with something of that quality was because we were actively discouraged from pursuing anything more complex or advanced than a glorified book report.
Furthermore, my advisor has this maddening habit of not telling us things we absolutely do need to know until it's far too late. As an example: we had a Research Methodology seminar at the beginning of May-- May, for crying out loud! When we started in March!-- where she told us only the very basic, elementary-school level "how to research" techniques, which if we didn't know by that point, we'd have been up shit creek without a paddle or even a boat; and then proceeded to hand out the schedules for when everything's due. Our semester ends at the end of June/beginning of July, so the assumption was that we'd have two more months to write our thirty pages in; but no. The first draft was due a month from that day. Then we spend all of June editing it for grammar. Which is funny, because that's all that's been happening in the meetings we each have with the advisor. All she does is correct our grammar, in lieu of telling us "oh, by the way, you ought to be X pages in by now, because your paper is due in its entirety on June 6!" There were people at that point who'd barely nailed down an idea; I have no idea how they'll manage to hand it in on time. Lucky for me, I was 11 pages in at the time, and was able to crank out nearly 20 pages more this month, because I was sent information I needed from the fund I'm researching, and also from Pro Mujer, but I'm sure the only reason I was able to get anything from Pro Mujer is because I intern with them. (My supervisor is an angel and put me in contact with their office in Argentina.) But if I hadn't gotten that information, I would also have found myself up shit creek.
I have some analysis and I think what I've analyzed is legit. I can maybe use some of this for a jumping off point for a thesis. I did a healthy chunk of my research, including the interviews, in Spanish, and wrote 28 pages' worth of research paper in Spanish; I am proud of myself for these things. I think I've done as well as can be expected, given the utter lack of support; but I am pissed as hell that this concentration was presented to us in such a nice shiny package when, in reality, it was a huge pain in the ass.
This concentration, which is called Directed Research, was basically research without any direction whatsoever. We were given practically no help in selecting a topic-- and when I wanted to try and narrow down my topic from the broad category of "all things microfinance," I was actively discouraged from pursuing microfinance at all, because not only my advisor, but the person she sent me to in the Ministry of Economics, decided (without having looked into it for even a second!) that there just wouldn't be any information available at all with regard to microfinance, and I might as well just not even bother. Long story short, I bothered. I bothered my way into 28 pages' worth of research paper, without further useful advice from the advisor, because she had none to give. She's not an economist, I can appreciate that, fine. She's a sociologist, advising twenty people's research papers on a wide array of topics; I don't expect her to have stunning insight into every nuance of every paper. But the least she could have done is have suggestions for places I could go, or people I could talk to, or helped me in organizing my thoughts into the structure of the paper, or done anything except discourage me from making a truly academic study of microfinance in Argentina, which is what I wanted to do. These 28 pages are not academic research; they cannot be entered into research competitions in the States or used as part of a thesis (which is what we were promised as to the quality of our final product); and the reason why nobody doing Directed Research this semester was able to come up with something of that quality was because we were actively discouraged from pursuing anything more complex or advanced than a glorified book report.
Furthermore, my advisor has this maddening habit of not telling us things we absolutely do need to know until it's far too late. As an example: we had a Research Methodology seminar at the beginning of May-- May, for crying out loud! When we started in March!-- where she told us only the very basic, elementary-school level "how to research" techniques, which if we didn't know by that point, we'd have been up shit creek without a paddle or even a boat; and then proceeded to hand out the schedules for when everything's due. Our semester ends at the end of June/beginning of July, so the assumption was that we'd have two more months to write our thirty pages in; but no. The first draft was due a month from that day. Then we spend all of June editing it for grammar. Which is funny, because that's all that's been happening in the meetings we each have with the advisor. All she does is correct our grammar, in lieu of telling us "oh, by the way, you ought to be X pages in by now, because your paper is due in its entirety on June 6!" There were people at that point who'd barely nailed down an idea; I have no idea how they'll manage to hand it in on time. Lucky for me, I was 11 pages in at the time, and was able to crank out nearly 20 pages more this month, because I was sent information I needed from the fund I'm researching, and also from Pro Mujer, but I'm sure the only reason I was able to get anything from Pro Mujer is because I intern with them. (My supervisor is an angel and put me in contact with their office in Argentina.) But if I hadn't gotten that information, I would also have found myself up shit creek.
I have some analysis and I think what I've analyzed is legit. I can maybe use some of this for a jumping off point for a thesis. I did a healthy chunk of my research, including the interviews, in Spanish, and wrote 28 pages' worth of research paper in Spanish; I am proud of myself for these things. I think I've done as well as can be expected, given the utter lack of support; but I am pissed as hell that this concentration was presented to us in such a nice shiny package when, in reality, it was a huge pain in the ass.