Sara's ARIA Project: Making Promises Credible: A Look at 300 Years of Peace Treaties
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From May to August 2020, I worked with Professor Krzysztof Pelc from the Department of Political Science on a number of his projects with varying degrees of involvement. My main project consisted of contributions towards an international database consisting of 300 years of peace and commercial treaties. In this report, I will mainly address a few challenges of my research internship to draw some conclusions from my experience. This will hopefully help me to extract as much educational value from this research assistantship as possible.
For the first six weeks, I assisted Professor Pelc with various tasks on multiple projects. During this time, I did not work many hours but was later able to compensate for the low hours count. Tasks consisted of small queries that I documented in brief reports to Professor Pelc. One difficulty I encountered with these tasks was that despite clear instructions, it was often hard to know what precise information the supervisor was asking for without knowing the scientific context of the query.
In a second phase, I worked on the treaty database and mainly transcribed and revised treaties for their later use in computational text analysis. Apart from this, I compiled a dictionary of German terms and phrases associated with divinity. Unfortunately, I was not able to complete all tasks as planned and did not have a great amount of time left to analyze the factors that influence peace durability. Similarly, I did not manage to register for an independent reading course whereby I would have written a paper on the research topic of peace treaties and durability. This was frustrating, as I need to earn the credits to graduate in Fall 2020; however, I had not been far enough into the data-creation process to execute a structured analysis that is necessary to write a research paper. Nonetheless, I do not regret the decision to drop the class and finish the internship with a little more time on my hands.
What I find most challenging about research assistantships is time management and the lack of constant feedback like it is the case in university classes. I personally work rather slowly, and I am used to investing more time than others into class assignments; however, if one is employed for a set number of hours per week, this approach results in little work being completed. Therefore, I had to push myself to work faster than usual with mixed results. In some instances, I felt as though the quality of the work decreased with less attention to detail being paid, while in other instances, I did not notice any difference.
Another challenge I encountered was to know when to update my supervisor, although this was a minor issue. If I was working on a matter for multiple days or weeks, I did not always update Professor Pelc on my progress and only contacted him to send him the final results. In future employments, I will choose to communicate more and also inform the supervisor of the deadlines that I am imposing on myself, which I have not consistently done during this internship.
I had little problems with any changes that the recent global pandemic brought about. Working from home was relatively easy for me, as I have no motivation issues and work best when there is little noise and interruption. Therefore, my quiet studio apartment was ideal to work in and the lockdown even helped my focus.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my time working on the Arts Research Internship and I am incredibly grateful to have had this opportunity. I am thankful for all the people that were involved in organizing ARIA and would like to communicate to them my gratitude. I would also like to thank Mrs. Betty Maldoff, Mr. Eric Maldoff, Mr. Gerry Maldoff, and Mrs. Barbara Maldoff for their generous support of my award. There are not many chances for undergraduates to be involved in academic research and I hope ARIA will encourage the 捆绑SM社区 Faculty of Arts as well as staff members employed by the faculty to create more opportunities for formal undergraduate student involvement in research.
My main lessons from this experience are that I need to learn better time management and that communication with one鈥檚 supervisor is vital for satisfactory teamwork. Moreover, I once more learned that I work well if my workflow is not interrupted.
