The pat week was a wild ride. After giving another practice presentation on Monday, submitting my final paper on Thursday, and delivering my final presentation on Friday, I completed AP Research, and the AP Capstone project. Here's a link to my slides. And here's a link to my paper. I can't thank my friends and family enough for showing up during the presentation. There was a lot pressure going into my presentation, but I managed to pull through. I crushed my presentation. Even the CEO of BASIS praised me for my presentation.
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| Me shortly after giving my presentation, greeting GG and Sergio |
I'd like to shout out my 2 mentors, Mrs. Haag and Dr. Ozkan. Mrs. Haag guided me through the process and kept me on track when I'd get behind or encounter errors. Every week something went wrong, I'd be extremely anxious. And when I went in for my meetings, she'd find a way to fix the error or help me rearrange my schedule to ease that anxiety. My expert advisor, Dr. Ozkan, helped understand and grasp the concepts of protein folding, and conserved regions. Without her, completing the project would be impossible. Also a mini shout out to my grad student mentors, who helped me iron out the computational errors in my project.
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| Shout out to my mentors |
The overall lesson I've learned from research is that planning is king. A theme common across AP Seminar and AP Research is the use of outlines. In other classes whenever a large paper was due, the responsibility to plan and outline the paper was on us. That's not a bad thing because in college the responsibility will lie with the student, but I never really grasped proper outlining techniques. After taking the AP Capstone program, I finally understand how to create a proper outline. We learned to integrate sources and structure our paper before actually writing it. The actual creation and writing of the paper is not as important as the argument and sources backing the paper.
As a debater and proficient public speaker, I thought communicating my research would be an easy task. But Mrs. Haag can tell you that the early drafts of my paper assumed too much knowledge and probably didn't make much sense to the average reader. I learned that providing background on topics as technical as protein folding is integral to the reader's understanding. Given my previous experience in communication, I purposely chose a highly technical topic to challenge myself. Now I have the groundwork laid down in case I have to pitch anything out of the box to someone in the future.
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| Anyone reading my first draft |
But don't let the previous experience in debate fool you, my presentation skills may have been on par, but my slides and script were not. After 4 Seminar presentations and a giant Research presentation, I have finally managed to create decent presentations. With minimal words on the slides and lots of pictures I learned how to convey my message to the audience.
The most important take away for me is to be confident. If anyone told me that I'd be writing a 30 page paper in Research two years ago, I'd respond with I am not taking that class. But I realized that I can write academic papers and I am capable of pursuing my interests.
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| Peace out |
Ashwath -- even though this final blog is late, I want to say that I am proud of all that you've accomplished. I think you did an excellent job delivering your final presentation, and it's been really rewarding seeing you grow throughout the year. I am glad that I could help ease your anxiety and help you figure out a plan. It's been a fun, wild ride working together, and I can honestly say that I'll miss you.
ReplyDelete'shwath, it was fun! I remember a couple times (and by a couple, I mean more than a couple) when we were the only ones up at 2am working on our research. I think that we all worked incredibly hard on our projects, and I think it reflected it as well. I agree that two years ago, if I had known what I would be doing in this class, then I would have thought that it would be impossible, but here we are, and we all have these amazing papers completed. In terms of your strategies, I agree that Capstone helped teach me to take advantage of assignments like the outlines because they were far more helpful then I originally made them out to be. Anyways, I'm glad that you were able to learn from this entire experience, because I certainly did as well.
ReplyDelete"The pat week was a wild ride." wow good start, haha. But I get it, it was definitely a wild ride of joy, stress, happiness, anger, and everything in between!! I'm glad you learned so much from AP Seminar and AP Research! Outlines are always really helpful, even if we don't feel like they are when we are doing them, only in hindsight. Also lol to you and your ego and how because you did debate, you can just wing/bs anything, haha. Research is different, it needs to engage the audience!!! I'm positive you gave a beautiful presentation! We are finally done! Good luck in college and in life!!!! (110)
ReplyDeleteHey Ashwath!
ReplyDeleteWow -- it's over! We started off the year as PSF 3rd floor buddies, and we ended that way too... it's been a pleasure watching you begin the year (semi) hating protein folding and feeling anxious about reading scientific papers to now having your own project with your own research paper!
I definitely agree about the process of outlining on our own and creating separate deadlines to be successful in college. Mrs. Haag and a few mistakes in Seminar definitely taught us that haha :)
I'm really proud you made such a great presentation and paper, and I look forward to see what amazing things you do, big boi! Always keep your regions conserved... ;)
See you on the paintball course!
Yash
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