I submitted my final paper!

This week, I finally submitted my paper!

Skip to 52 seconds to see my reaction. 

I apologize for the foul language around 14 seconds. But his reaction at 52 seconds is worth it. 

Oh my god! What a relief! How awesome of an accomplishment too! I have essentially submitted an undergraduate research paper, as a high school senior. My final paper was 3980 words, so around thirteen pages and then at least thirty pieces of work were cited. Although now that I think about it… I realize I made a dumb mistake. Even though my research was centered around analyzing seven pieces of literature, I never cited them in my works cited (If Mrs. Haag is reading this and hasn’t graded my paper yet, I’m totally kidding. I would never do something so silly. Take my word for it). Alright well this past week’s work was pretty challenging to be honest. I focused on three parts of my paper that needed the most changes: the abstract, the results, and the discussion.

Abstracts are surprisingly difficult to write. The reason that it’s so difficult, is the same reason that the presentation portion is ending up being more difficult: it’s hard to condense months of research into 100-250 words. Largely, there’s a portion of me who is still clinging to part of my original research ideas. When I started, my research was all over the place. I knew I wanted to do something with synesthesia, but I couldn’t figure what I wanted to do, so I learned so much about synesthesia. I learned about how the brain’s of synesthetes vary from non-synesthetes’ brains. I learned about how grapheme-color synesthesia isn’t exclusive to graphemes like letters and numbers, but also shapes. I learned about the genetic components of synesthesia. I questioned, and still do!, why identical twins are sometimes born with different synesthesia, or only one twin has synesthesia (if I could research anything with all the resources, and all the time, and all the money, I would try to figure out why sometimes only one twin will have synesthesia). I obviously learned a lot. A lot of material didn’t make it into my paper, but it still resides in my brain. So condensing all I know about synesthesia, Russian and American literature, and the industrial revolution is very challenging.

The results. This was the easiest part of the paper to edit. The results themselves did not change, but I tried to include more visually pleasing ways to view the results and more comprehensive ways to understand the results. Based on the review of my peers, the changes were nice and I achieved my goal.

Lastly was the results section. The results section was the hardest. I was happy with the limitations section and future implications, but I was lacking in the actual analysis of my results, quite possibly the most important portion of the results section. After reorganizing my results section, my findings became much clearer though. Unfortunately, my conclusion was that the books I chose to read were too different in subject matter to be able to attribute any differences in the portrayal of synesthesia to the culture. Hopefully though, someone in the future will find literature of similar subject matter and redo my research. Maybe I’ll even be able to do it! Well until next time!

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