Mid-term Reflection
It’s time to reflect! To be honest, my progress hasn’t met the goals I set at the beginning of the semester. Because my other ongoing courses require extensive reading and demanding assignments, I have had to invest more energy in them than I planned. However, I am happy that many of the readings and topics from those courses have provided inspiration for my MA project. Building a website is not only the ideal medium to present my research findings, but also an opportunity to learn new skills. So far, my production milestones include completing LinkedIn Learning courses on web development, regularly browsing websites for design inspiration, and gathering multimedia assets for my site. Moving forward, I need to align my web design with my research progress—determining how many sections the website needs and the best visualization format for each.
Thanks to reading more academic literature, receiving suggestions from professors, and having discussions with classmates, my research logic is much clearer now than at the beginning of the semester. My research will be theoretically supported by Joseph Nye’s work on soft power, David Hesmondhalgh’s analysis in The Cultural Industries, and various studies on contemporary Korean culture. To ensure my final deliverable meets the expectations of a “theoretically informed, formal paper,” I will ground my arguments in peer-reviewed academic articles. Meanwhile, as two alumni recently emphasized, systematically categorizing and recording all sources is crucial.
In the second half of this semester, regarding research and writing, I hope to maintain a steady reading habit without feeling anxious or rushed. For production, since my website is a visualization of my research, its creation will “lag” slightly behind my writing. Therefore, while conducting research and writing the paper, I will continue exploring various web-building tools and methods, as mastering multiple tools will ultimately make the final presentation of my project better.