Over the course of the semester, my research process has changed immensely in different ways. Prior to this class, I had very little research experience and had never completed a research project in its entirety and involving people I did not know. I had previously completed literature reviews for other classes so that was not new territory for me but what followed the literature review was. I learned just how much goes into a research project like the one we completed and how patience and comprehension are very necessary. Our research project included qualitative and quantitative variables and also required us to analyze those variables as well. The way in which we did so was new to me. Coding our data in ‘Rstudio’ in order to find the data that was needed was something I had never done before and hadn’t even considered to be so important to the research process. Throughout this process and over the course of the semester, my research process has grown and I am much more knowledgable when it comes to conducting and analyzing research than I was prior to this class. My process for evaluating and selecting sources involves a couple of different steps in order to determine if that source is usable or not. These include making sure that the source is from a reliable place whatever that may be and the source itself has also been reviewed. Following that, I evaluate parts of the source like the abstract then skim through the article itself and lastly read the conclusion as well to see if it fits with my variables and topic. Lastly, I have to narrow down sources that I have deemed acceptable to ones that I think are the best to use. This involves reading through the articles and looking for the themes that you are working with. I encountered fewer challenges than I thought I would over the course of the research. One of these challenges included selecting sources for the literature review. There were a lot of sources to choose from and narrowing that selection down to only the ones I wanted to use was challenging. In order to overcome this, I looked more thoroughly into how each of the sources related to my topic and variables to determine which were the best to incorporate into my review. Another challenge was working with ‘Rstudio’ because there was a specific order that you had to type everything in, in order to get the data we needed such as the mean. In order to overcome this I had to ask others questions in order to make sure I was getting it right. My attitudes and perceptions of research have definitely changed over the course of the semester in this class. I used to view research as such a tedious thing that I didn’t have the patience for and I dismissed the thought of including it in later stages of my career. Following taking this class, I see research as a much more valuable thing than I used to and see more of its importance to all fields of study. Now, I could potentially see myself pursuing research down the line and hope to continue doing more research throughout the rest of my academic career. Thinking like a researcher means being patient and expecting challenges throughout the course of your research but knowing how to deal with those challenges. Thinking like a researcher also means analyzing bits and pieces of data in order to look for things like themes and patterns to better understand what you are researching and the data itself. A researcher has to be strategic with what they do and know the question they are asking.