Shift #18 - 2nd Quarter Intro Meeting & Research Plan Brainstorming
Monday, June 10, 2024 | 12-1 pm CST/1-2 pm EST (1 hr)
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Michelle Hurt, student/intern
Jennifer Gonzalez, practicum supervisor
This is a screenshot from yesterday's 2nd quarter introduction meeting. I appreciate these large group meetings that Jennifer hosts, especially to usher us into the second quarter of our internship.
At the beginning of each quarter in this twelve-week internship, my practicum supervisor Jennifer hosts an introduction meeting for the next three weeks. It's a good chance for all the interns to be together in the "same" room and to be reminded of important information that we will need to take care of in the weeks ahead. Jennifer set the agenda by stating that she would go over webinars and meetings we should attend and that she would go over research plans and sourcing. There are quite a few meetings each week that interns are strongly encouraged to attend, especially required meetings. However, Jennifer is very understanding that things come up and so, if we need to miss a required meeting with our intern cohort, we can email her after the fact and she will send us a link to the video recording. This week, we have a required webinar hosted by a law librarian, to go over law basics for non-JD students. I'm quite excited about this one, but I'm a little apprehensive about understanding all the information. Hopefully the title of "basics" rings true. Next week, we have another required webinar - a research "speed dating" meeting where each intern will have five minutes to speak to a reference librarian about our approved topic and ask specific questions. For both of these required meetings, I have it on my to-do list to start brainstorming questions!
Jennifer also talked about research plans and sourcing during the last half of the meeting. Though research plans are not required to be submitted, she highly encouraged us to come up with a plan that works for us. She is actually delaying us to start writing because she wants the collections and our research process to guide us. This makes a lot of sense so that we can get to know items in the collections better and see how the items lead us to the exact story of our topic. Jennifer reminded us that the Library of Congress (namely, the Law Library) and its collections are our first and most authoritative source. We can still use outside sources but we need to make sure they follow the guidelines we've been given (the website must be reputable, free, and lacking advertisements). As far as research plans are concerned, if we draw one up, this is something we can share with our small group mentor. I've actually never created a formal research plan but I'm sure that in previous graduate assignments, I probably did informal ones. A research plan will help us with our purpose, the scope of study (how we can approach our topic), our research approach (an outline or topical sections), images and sources we collect. After our meeting ended, I did an online search for research plans and began brainstorming my approach to such a plan. I learned that a research plan will help me to be organized, keep stakeholders (like my practicum supervisor and small group mentor) informed, have a clear purpose and know my objectives, not be distracted by unnecessary tasks and be focused on the important to-do's, form my actual method of research, and come up with a schedule. I definitely need to finalize what kind of research plan I want to use (even thinking about using an Excel spreadsheet versus a Word document) so I can begin focused research!
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