After presenting my thesis topic to my class last week and receiving feedback from my instructor, I feel both excited and scared/worried. My goal moving forward as I move on to secondary research is to dig a little deeper and refine my topic. But, what if I don’t find anything? What if I completely fail? How do I know I found the thing that hasn’t been found yet? (That last question might sound a little silly) After last week, I took a mental hiatus (thanks to the long President’s Day weekend), but this week I am ready to continue my research and actively try not to get hung up on the what-ifs.

To begin, I created a doc titled “Contextual Review”, which will outline the questions who, what, why, and how, and help guide me through my contextual reviews of the research I find. My goal is that this will also keep me on track — eye on the prize.

Next, I listed some keywords that can be used to begin my secondary research. For this, I drew directly from my research topic.

• social media
• teens
• depression
• anxiety
• suicide

The readings for each week have been guiding me on what my next steps should be, which is really helpful since this is my first thesis. But I’d be lying if I said that the information didn’t overwhelm me! However, I appreciate the methodology that is shared in both readings from this week to be applied to reading scholarly articles, journal publications, books, and other pre-existing thesis papers. All of these types of publications can be very dense, so grabbing what I can from each publication might be really good for time management. I also appreciate being validated by the fact that it’s OK to jump around non-fiction literature. Furthermore, jumping around is encouraged!

Next Steps

• Begin looking through a database of scholarly articles to identify the research that has already been done using my keywords.
• Research free citation management software.