WEEK 1-Reflection
Greetings! This is Will. Welcome to my week 1 blog, and thanks for your time to view my totally “free” writing.
It was actually a surprise when I heard I should start this weekly blog from week 1 because I haven’t prepared to start thinking about my project, especially in week 1 when I tried to sort out my courses, timetable and readings. What I did the most during this week is adjusting myself into a state of learning. Fortunately, I have gradually get into the pace with the help of nice classmates, professors and student advisor.
So, I decide to push myself to begin a habit of writing blogs. I hope this blog will become a good place where I can temperately jump out of intensive readings/assignments to refresh my mind and where I help myself to keep a big picture about the most important final project in mind among ideas emerged in every week. I’m sure the weekly blog will encourage me to repeatedly review my thinking and eventually benefit my project. It will be even better if I could inspire others.
Why DIS
I chose this master programme from a journalism undergraduate. Though it armed me with many media production skills and trained my thinking, I thought the skills or ability I learned are not sufficient and deep enough to be a person who makes difference to social inequality issues (to escape suffocating job competition is another practical reason hh, honestly). Data journalism is a specific track I have been interested in, so to learn the hard skill, data analysis, and generate insights thru this method in a critical and cross-disciplinary way are the main reasons why I came here. And I appreciate so much the interdisciplinary nature of EFI, and here is what I expected—I met many brilliant guys with different disciplines & backgrounds; I felt the passion of people here who are eager to achieve their clear academic goals on this platform (this is what I should learn from). Can’t wait to have lectures and seminars with you guys in DIS courses!
My ideas and plan for project
I haven’t come up with a certain topic of my future project so far. The very first idea occurred to me is to expand projects in my undergraduate. One is a feature article about the education inequality between an county in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and coastal cities in China, which depicts a voluntary teacher’s one year teaching experience; the other is an light investigation of how government takes farmers’ homestead for living and production by peremptory policies and concentrate them into newly-built flats. But no quantitative methods and datasets were applied or quoted in these projects. So, I haven’t figure it out, which makes me a little bit embarrassed. However, I think after few lectures and the readings, I will have some thinkings or ideas that can be primitively organised.
So, this is a brief and casual introduction about myself. Thank you so much for reading it. And I think the blog in the next week will seem more informative and prepared lol.
Welcome, Will! I come from a journalism background as well (I agree it’s a ROUGH industry to break into).
I feel like it might be possible to find datasets related to both those topic ideas if that’s where you’re interest lies. Test results seem like the kind of information that would be publicly released by education bureaus (though it could depend what additional details you would need). And then I feel like there have been some studies into farmer displacement in different parts of China (a couple years ago, I was doing a story that involved urban displacement in a city in Jiangsu, and I feel like I ran across a few professors that had studied rural displacement and government land sales because it seemed like that was much better studied than the urban renovation niche I was focused on). Maybe after you get settled in, it’s worth looking at the academic literature out there to see what professors or institutions/organizations have published something (and where their numbers came from)? I think you still have some time on this, though, before you need to narrow anything down even though it feels like that moment is suddenly upon us.
Hey, Theresa! Thanks so much for your reply and suggestions! I have the same feelings of narrowing down the topic when initiating a report. You are right, I will try to find papers to explore my topic and appropriate datasets in the coming weeks. Thanks again!
And I saw your photograph projects and report on your website. I do like those about COVID, like marathons and the wardrobe, which are very realistic and thorough. I know it’s not easy to have these photos and publish. I also wrote some reports with my friends about quarantine and other issues. Though they are not very up-to-date, I’d like to share with you if you are interested.
https://anniesnowyzhang.wixsite.com/diaryofquarantine/blog
https://anniesnowyzhang.wixsite.com/isthatlove
By the way, I’m from Binzhou, Shandong, which is not far from Changzhou hh.
Thanks for your blog and for sharing your other writings in your reply comment above. Covid has really laid bare the inequalities in our global society and I think culture has played a role in how different governments have reacted. I am looking forward to hearing more about your project ideas!