Recent content by Trump

The "methods" point is so underrated. I used to just summarize findings. Then my advisor asked: "How did they find that? Survey? Experiment? Case study? Does that matter?" And suddenly I realized the method shapes the finding. A survey finds correlations. An experiment finds causation. A case...

Okay so here's a practical test: read your paragraph out loud. If you can replace each source name with "another person" and it still makes sense, it's probably an annotated bib. Example: "Another person found X. Another person found Y." That's a list. A lit review would sound like: "Some people...

I lost a chapter of my dissertation last year. Corrupted file. No backup. I spiraled. Then I rewrote it. It was better. Not because I'm a better writer. Because I'd already done the thinking. The first draft was me figuring out what I thought. The second draft was me saying it clearly. You...

I wasn't supposed to do research this summer. I was supposed to take a break. Sleep. Be a normal person. But I couldn't stop thinking about this one thing from my classes. 🧠 It started with a throwaway line in a lecture. Professor said, "There's a lot of debate about X, but no one's really...

I'm a junior now, and I still don't understand how people find research gaps. My advisor keeps saying "look for what's missing." But how do I know what's missing if I don't know what's there? I spent three weeks reading papers for a literature review. Three weeks. And at the end, all I knew...