Alycia Holwerda

            As my introduction to the Honors Program, I completed the Honors First Year Seminar class. In this class I learned about the various competencies: leadership, research, and global citizenship. My research essay reflected what I learned about this competency. I researched various articles, books, and opinions to gain a better understanding of research and the research process.

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            To learn more about research, I effectively, efficiently, and critically searched the internet via search engine as well as academic databases (Information Literacy: Level 1). I learned how to use different filters, settings, and key words to find what I was looking for. I also learned how to ethically use this information (Information Literacy: Level 2). I practiced citing my resources. Ethics is a huge role in research. By falsifying information or not citing sources, my research would be incorrect, dishonest, and fraudulent. This essay allowed me to practice my abilities on organizing others’ ideas (Information Synthesis: Level 1). I incorporated others’ ideas on research into my own philosophy that I stated in this paper.

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            After completing the unit on Research as well as writing this paper, I had a solid foundation of what research was, how to ethically research, and why research was critical to society. I could now take these fundamental thoughts and apply them to my original research in classes as well as hackathon competitions. Throughout my career I hoped to continue to effectively, efficiently, critically, and ethically add new information to society as well as myself.

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