Went to the final meeting before my first lesson/supervision starts tomorrow – currently I have definite options for my title and plan to have that narrowed down by the end of tomorrow after I have spoken with my supervisor. However thinking about it over the past few days I feel like I am being pulled towards a project on Alexander the Great just because I have never studied it before and that it has the potential for so much more than just looking at one person because of how influential he was in history. This was consolidated as I took a book out of the library yesterday – The Mysteries of the Oracles by Philipp Vandernburg – just to help me in my decision and the index has quite a few references to Alexander the Great and how he may have been influenced by Oracles which suggests of an interesting avenue I could take when researching him.
The meeting today was on conducting research for my EPQ, this is obviously a skill I need to develop as prior to this my researching has never really gone beyond googling and reading books so I needed to learn how to refine my google searches to get the best possible options, the resources offered by the LRC and how to access them and how to quote and reference in my project.
In the meeting I therefore learnt how to access the digital copies of journals and books the college has and better ways of searching such as Google Scholar which is a more academic search engine and should find some very good journal entries for me to use, I have never even come across this form of Google before but it should prove to be very useful when doing my EPQ. It also touched upon how to reference and I learnt that I have to mention any sources I use twice: once within what I’ve written and at the end in alphabetical order, it was also mentions that a good idea would be to have a list of references of the sources I didn’t use in my actual final piece but in researching context. Furthermore I learnt that I will have to use Harvard referencing, however I will designate learning more about this for when I have an actual title to work towards and can begin researching in earnest.
This should become more useful, and more evident, as I get deeper into my EPQ.
Next step: talk to my supervisor about my topic options and decide on a title by the end of Wednesday (tomorrow) which is when I will meet them and then begin a long term plan and begin to research.
- I would also like to begin to make this diary more digital i.e. a blog so there is less chance of it being lost due to technological malfunctions. As I do not know how to create a blog I shall ask and do this in tomorrow’s session as well
The meeting today was on conducting research for my EPQ, this is obviously a skill I need to develop as prior to this my researching has never really gone beyond googling and reading books so I needed to learn how to refine my google searches to get the best possible options, the resources offered by the LRC and how to access them and how to quote and reference in my project.
In the meeting I therefore learnt how to access the digital copies of journals and books the college has and better ways of searching such as Google Scholar which is a more academic search engine and should find some very good journal entries for me to use, I have never even come across this form of Google before but it should prove to be very useful when doing my EPQ. It also touched upon how to reference and I learnt that I have to mention any sources I use twice: once within what I’ve written and at the end in alphabetical order, it was also mentions that a good idea would be to have a list of references of the sources I didn’t use in my actual final piece but in researching context. Furthermore I learnt that I will have to use Harvard referencing, however I will designate learning more about this for when I have an actual title to work towards and can begin researching in earnest.
This should become more useful, and more evident, as I get deeper into my EPQ.
Next step: talk to my supervisor about my topic options and decide on a title by the end of Wednesday (tomorrow) which is when I will meet them and then begin a long term plan and begin to research.
- I would also like to begin to make this diary more digital i.e. a blog so there is less chance of it being lost due to technological malfunctions. As I do not know how to create a blog I shall ask and do this in tomorrow’s session as well