Although we just started, I'm already excited about being in the Independent Study and Mentorship program. I can tell that by staying in this class and working hard, I'll be able to go to places that I never even imagined. It's only been a couple of weeks, but I've already created a digital portfolio, completed a research assessment, and created accounts on platforms to connect with others. However, just by doing this, I learned that there is still so much that I don't know. One of the tasks we were assigned this week was to analyze an article pertaining to our topic, and my topic is astrophysics. I love the subject, but after reading the article, I was able to learn so much more about the specifics of the job requirements and what type of people succeed in this field. This is perfect, but the article also opened up so many more questions for me to research and discover the answers to.
In the past weeks, we also gave a speech to our class describing who we were and why we were pursuing our topics of choice. This was a great experience for me because, although I never freeze when giving speeches or presentations, I'm not the most natural either. Communication skills are so important for ISM, so it's encouraging to see that we've already began working on developing these skills. Over the next few weeks, we'll be conducting even more research assessments and learning more about our topics, and I'm burning to get started right away!