Information Seeking

I knew that I wanted to be apart of some team or club here at MSU. I almost thought about walking-on the Varsity Swim Team here, but they practice 5 hours a day, and that would be a major time-drainer. So I thought about joining a club team instead. I searched the MSU websites to see what kinds of clubs they had, and I stumbled across a club Water Polo team. I have never played water polo before, but I was a great swimmer in high school, so I thought I would do some research about it. I went to Google (of course) and found a lot of websites describing how to play the sport. I found sites that discribed the different positions of the players and the rules of the game. The site told me what the certain penalties were and what kinds of behaviors would result in one. I learned a lot about the structure of a water polo team, and different techniques that I would have to learn to know how to play. I basically found everything that I was looking for.

There were many times when I had to do research for a school project. I remember in 11th grade, my whole class had to write an essay about Lord of the Flies. I really hated that book, so the paper was extremely hard for me to write. I remember having to analyze a lot of the characters in the book. My main tool for my research was my Lord of the Flies book. I used the internet a little bit, but I couldn't really find what I was looking for. In the book, I searched for clues that would help me figure out each character's personality, ability, backround, and intentions.

Research, in my opinon, is any way of looking for information that you need. I think the past 2 experiences that I described both classify as research. I liked researching water polo, because it was actually something that interested me. But I hated reading and researching Lord of the Flies. I just feel like the story went nowhere and it wasn't as exciting as I hoped it would be.