Questioning my judgment for Topic choices

I am in awe of the wide variety of projects that were created in past senior seminars. To be totally honest, it is a little daunting. I loved all of the projects and they all seemed to answer such important questions and looked into such complex topics. All of their topics were very innovative and I am honestly not sure how they came up with their ideas. I need some serious help brainstorming in order to get to the point of establishing such a concrete topic for my project. I especially enjoyed the project about international students on campus. I think it came from an interesting perspective and enjoyed the experts of the international students writing throughout the project.

Coming into this class I had a few ideas of what I wanted to focus on, but it was nothing concrete. After reading and looking at the projects and ideas of past students, I feel very unprepared. Their projects were so specific and narrowed down to a particular point. My ideas seem way too broad to even consider, nor do I know how to exactly narrow them down to a specific point that would make the idea eligible for a senior seminar project.

While I am still pretty lost on my topic, I did realize the types of projects I did not want to pursue. My largest revelation from viewing other projects is that I learned which kinds of projects I did not want to pursue as it pertains to medium. While I enjoyed some of the typical research papers, I think I want to explore a different medium for my project. I won’t exactly know how I want to present my project until I narrow down my topic ideas and see which medium works for which project, but I think I want to try something multimodal.

My most pertinent question at the moment is figuring out how to narrow down my ideas into a single concrete topic. Looking back at past projects I have done during my time at Transy, my favorites were based on topics I cared very strongly about. My top two include my research project into John F Kennedy and how I believe he would be a republican if he were alive today, and second, a case study into the stereotypes revolving around Orange County women and how they are misjudged because of the extreme media misconceptions. While both of these topics can be pushed further, I think I want to pursue different questions within the same genre of ideas. So while I have narrowed my thought process down to either California or Political based questions, my main concern right now is figuring out the question I want to research, and what opinions I want to express in my project.