Orlando+Hernandez'+Research+Log+(Fall+2014)

Orlando Hernandez' Portfolio Orlando Hernandez' Current Research Log

This part of my research log is backdated. A conservative estimate of my time would put the total time spent on memos thus far at approximately 25 hours. I would also say that I've spent 40 hours reading during the past month or so.
 * 8/27 - 10/5 **

Honestly, If I'm being blunt, when I write this all out, I feel extremely stupid because while I spent a lot of time working on my thesis, I have nothing to show for it. I tried to absorb lots of information in the hopes that I would have this "Eureka moment.' I was too worried to write because I was concerned that if it wasn't "perfect," that I shouldn't waste my time. However, moving forward, I will be more meticulous in my documentation and can be in a better position to be iterative with my research.

After talking with Brandon today, I feel a bit better about the direction of my thesis. While I have not previously documented my research out of anxiety that I was doing something "wrong" or "wasting time" I now know to document everything I do, whether it involves memo writing or literature reading. I think that the direction I will go in will be to revisit my memos and see if I get any new inspiration. I don't really expect to but it can't hurt. After that, I will just start doing annotations and explore the body of literature that exists. I kind of know what is out there to some extent but, because I foolishly didn't document anything, I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel and reread some things. Oh well, at least I learned this earlier on I suppose???
 * 10/6 **

I read a few more articles. I'm still waiting until class this Wednesday before making more substantial progress.
 * 10/7 **

Today's class was very useful to me in making me think about how to articulate things better. When asked about my methods, I simply replied that I was going to use interviews because I wanted to be more specific. When asked what that meant, being forced to flesh out that idea was very useful to me. I have decided that when I mean that I want to be more specific I mean that interviews with professional staff, student staff, and residents will allow me to see perceptions of sustainability and see what the culture of sustainability is within the residence halls.
 * 10/8 **

One example that I utilized was the program "Hey Red, Go Green." One of the events during this program is the "Eco Hall Challenge" where energy usage from each of the residence halls are measured to see who can utilize the least amount of energy. In my experience as a Resident Assistant, some residents went so far as to plug more things in with the intention of consuming more energy. Their thought process was that they pay a fixed fee for housing and wanted to milk every last penny they could as a result. This led me to think about if residence halls could charge a flat fee for utilities and if you used less than that you got a refund. This could create an incentive to save energy usage. This is just a preliminary thought though.

It was also brought up that one thing that interviews can reveal is if there exists a position for talking about certain things. For instance, while I want to get to the culture of sustainability within RPI, it may be possible that some questions don't have answers not because of apathy but simply because it isn't anyone's job to think about answers to those questions. Maybe a creation of a new sustainability position could help with things like this?

I went over some old memos and reread them to gather some inspiration and kind of rethink where I'm headed with my thesis.
 * 10/9 **

I revised my proposal somewhat. It isn't finalized yet but I haven't been feeling well this weekend so I didn't get as much work done on it as I would have liked. I will continue in the morning after I have rested a bit,
 * 10/12 **