Week 5!

Hi everyone, and welcome to Week 5 of my blog!

This week, I spent a lot of time finding and sending files to a secure group that is working with my company. I was specifically looking for contracts, building design documents, and start-up reports, because we need these documents to prove building eligibility. I keep track of all of these documents (as well as other notable aspects of my 179D report for these buildings) in Excel, so I’m learning a lot about computer systems too. Searching for these documents did take up a lot of time, especially since I was on a time crunch (i.e. I had to submit them all by Friday), so I didn’t have time to do much else at my internship this week.

I also focused on branching out and reading/annotating new sources this week, mostly recent/current news articles about different positions on the Russo-Ukrainian war (and, specifically, instances of past negotiation attempts between the two countries – i.e. the ones facilitated by Belarus and Turkey, which were mostly unsuccessful). For the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been fixated on annotating/evaluating a few sources, and I don’t want to constrain my research to a few narrow points of view about conflict resolution. Though I probably can’t learn about every single theory in conflict resolution over this narrow time period, I still need to make sure my research ends up being well-rounded. If anyone has any suggestions for additional conflict resolution readings in the comments, from different/unusual perspectives, I’d always appreciate it.

As I was doing my readings this week, I also found that taking notes by hand, instead of using my computer, was really helpful for keeping my focus on the material and actually remembering what I read over. I’ll probably be doing more handwritten annotations in the future, too.

I’m taking my Spring Break next week, so I won’t be posting any update. Still, I can’t wait to report on what I’ve learned when I get back.

Thanks for reading! ~ Maria