The process that I have gone through for completing academic research has changed a significant amount since taking this class. Before taking Dr. Pederson, I had never completed a research project from beginning to end, nor had I ever taken surveys from people in the community. For the research assignment many sources were needed to ensure the proper information was taken into account. The process for finding these sources has been similar to the way in which I found sources for other projects during my time at Longwood in which I used Longwood’s Greenwood library database to find scholarly sources that have been peer reviewed. As I would go through the numerous amounts of papers, previously completed research projects, and academic articles, I looked for ones that seemed interesting but also relevant to the topic. One challenge that was brought up when doing research for this class was that there were very many sources, but it was time consuming to go through them and see which ones would relate to the defendant and independent variables we chose for the research project. I feel as though my attitude and confidence level about doing research has changed after taking this class and completing the project. Before the start of the project I was very nervous about what would occur and felt like I wasn’t very sure of myself with what I was doing, but now I feel as though I could do another research project and I would have the knowledge that I learned from this class to aid me in the future. After the research I’ve completed this semester, the phrase “think like a researcher” to me means to take several things into account. What I mean by this is if a person is curious about a topic such as how many people play sports in their hometown, then they would go through the proper steps of created an unbiased survey and find out the answer. However, after finding the answer, it would not end there because then there are several things to take into account about why people may or may not play sports, so then a researcher would go further in depth for the reasoning behind everything that goes on around them.