Once again, this was an exciting a busy week. After rescheduling, we were able to meet with Dr. Farless to discuss the future of the internship on Tuesday. She was pleased with the progress we had made and outlined our future plans to talk with the actual document authors. It was exciting to learn that she trusted our skills to edit now and now wanted to focus on actually helping manage the editing load.
The biggest growth this week was communicating changes in schedules. Dr. Farless, Trish, and I agreed to change our Tuesday meeting date to Friday. This would allow Dr. Farless more time to look over our edits and prepare for the meeting. This change would also allow me to prepare for the meetings better. Previously, I attended the meetings immediately after work. While this wasn't impossible, I was often stressed about making it to the meetings on time. For example, I usually have to find somewhere to do the zoom call. It's hard to find quiet places on campus now, so often I end up speaking quietly in a crowded place. With meetings now on Fridays, I can zoom from the comfort of my apartment. I also look forward to coming to meetings better prepared.
Some other things we discussed is whether or not to publish an article. Originally, I felt the article should be published. I thought the ideas were interesting and the perspective was new. However, after discussing it with Trish, the other intern, I realized that it was not fit to publish.
The paper had two main problems. Firstly, it had poor quality sources. This meant the sources could not be retraced or were from incredible sources. this was not true for all of the sources, but it would require possibly difficult research to fix.
Secondly, it was thematically disjointed. Dr. Farless stressed that each paragraph should have its own thesis that ties back to the main thesis. Often, the paragraphs would be missing this detail. This resulted in an overall weak paper. To fix this, the writer would need to extensively rework their writing.
While I recognized both these things, I figured they would be solved with revision.
However, Trish pointed out this article was written (possibly) over a year ago. The writer may not want to revisit this paper and make such complicated revisions. This was not something I had thought of, and it was interesting to hear this perspective. In the end, we decided not to publish. With this meeting, I learned more about the process of deciding which articles should be published in the journal. I will keep this in mind when I submit my own papers for publication.
Last week, we were requested to start documenting our internship. So, after this meeting, I took a photo of all of us on the zoom call! From this experience, I have learned I need to work on my photo taking skills and dust my computer screen.
