As a senior, I designed an anthropology thesis research project that included surveying and interviewing senior and first-year women to determine how, why, and to what extent they achieved their educational and personal goals. I was proud of the 40-page paper I produced at the end of the project! The critiques I received from my adviser and thesis committee, however, make me cringe to this day. They provided negative and well-deserved comments about not only the many typos, grammatical mistakes, and page-break errors in the paper, but also about the premise of the project, the methods I chose, and my analysis and conclusions. I’m not sure I read all of the comments in one sitting, as they were so difficult to internalize. Not only was my senior research project a practical learning experience, but so was accepting criticism as valuable feedback for improvement. My Grinnell research project still serves as a humbling reminder to carefully consider my choices of approaches and personal biases in the research I do today.
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