With the second meeting of myself and my supervisor coming to a close now is the time for me to reflect on decisions I have made leading up to this point of me having completed a large portion of my investigation. Firstly I should discuss the decisions that I have made that have led up to this point one large one being the choice to focus more on the Chartists than the event of history I will be focussing on which is the Chartist uprising. Most of my books that I have checked out have been about chartism due to the fact that I feel that it is important for myself to first gained knowledge on the broader topic of my EE as I then feel that I can zoom in and fully understand the causation and effect once I start to invest more time into the uprising itself. This is also necessary as I have never studied the topic in class before so i didn’t know too much about the original topic.
I have found it pretty easy to make research decisions as it is such a straight forward topic despite noticing that there’s a bit of a wormhole I could fall into and go off tangent. Thus I try to stay on task and refresh the question in my head in order to get information that is implicitly relevant to the question. I would say however that I should have been recording my findings earlier as at the start I treated it like an independent study where I thought that I would gain some knowledge about the topic and then find sources. Whereas in hindsight I should have been documenting everything. I have been meticulous about choosing sources and have only used reliable sites such as the ones recommended by my supervisor and I use JSTOR for all academic works that are reliable. Most of my primary sources are from the Newport Chartist museum and the Westgate hotel where I have physical copies of everything.
I now have a solid plan and I have spoken to my supervisor and she has laid out timelines and deadlines so I know what I need to do and by when. I think I have under planned and been too focused on research so I now know that I should focus more on the writing aspect of my EE. I have found it pretty easy to plan my EE as the organisation for History is extensive and very well organised and thought through in a clear manner. I’ve learned through this project to communicate with my supervisor and inform her with everything as it makes decisions so much easier and gives me less stress so i can see my interpersonal communication skills and collaboration improving and I look forward to continuing and going and writing my Extended essay intro for the May 22nd deadline.