Shifting Focus

In the past couple of weeks I have been focusing on progressing my research for my original work. The original work seems like the most daunting task so far and I have been dedicating a significant amount of my time to the research. While this has been enjoyable and a learning experience, I realized this week that I needed to shift my focus a little bit more to research interviews as this experience is equally important to my development in ISM.

I had my first interview a couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed talking with a professional in my prospective field. While it was quite nerve racking in the beginning, I found myself learning valuable skills and information. Since this was such a valuable experience I decided that this week should be focused primarily on continuing these research interviews. I had the opportunity to converse with two chemical engineers, David Abbott and Michelle Rinehart. These two professionals have very different job descriptions and I was very excited to discuss how they ended up in their particular career.

After conversing with these two individuals earlier in the week I found a very interesting similarity between all the professionals I have interviewed so far. When asked the question, what is the most important skill in your line of work, every professional has answered communication without any kind of hesitation. This emphasis on communication has led me to reflect on my own communication skills and figure out if this is something that I need to work on. Perhaps I can take some sort of soft skills online communication class in order to grow these skills before entering college and the professional world.

I think that shifting my focus to these research interviews for this week was very important to my growth in ISM and my overall knowledge of my prospective career, but I feel as though progress on my original work took a significant hit. Going into the future I think it is important to find a kind of balance between research for my original work and these interviews. This is definitely something that I am planning on implementing this week in order to find myself more productive and make some progress on both aspects of my research.