Project 2 Reflections

Project 2 had us research into the conversation of race within our field of study. At first, being a physics major, I really did not know the specifics regarding the demographics despite having a strong feeling of what they were going to be. As I began to conduct my research, I found out that demographics are ridiculously skewed towards white males and there is an abysmally small amount of minorities receiving a doctorate in this field. The proportions will literally blow you away. Black male and females represent roughly 3% of the bachelor’s degrees in physics and an even smaller percentage of that is represented for the doctoral degrees. I knew prior that the representation was going to be skewed in favor of the white population, but for black people to only have a representation of 3% was an unreal cultural shock. Given that I am also a white male, contributing to this disproportionality.

I, originally, was dreading this project due to the number of annotations required. It was particularly difficult to find many sources that would cover a particular theme in the field. The field of physics is simply not large enough for there to be an excess of sources when you compare it to a larger field like business. However, as I continued to make progress while working on the project it became easier to fit in the criteria needed per annotations, as well as my overall writing quality. As you continue to produce annotations, you learn to write better and more concise within the word count to give off the most relevant information regarding your article. This project was very helpful for the future in my collegiate career simply because now I am more familiar with the writing process. I now have an understanding of how you let ideas formulate from the empirical evidence that I collected while researching for this project.