Rockin Research

Photo courtesy of Ping Recreation Center website

 

 

If you decided to go rock climbing at Ping on Thursday night, you may have been watched...by me! I situated myself a few feet behind the wall to take my first stab at field research that night. I never realized I would be taking five and a half pages of notes in just one hour! I thought it would be awkward and that everyone would be suspicious of me but turns out I was just being paranoid. I was able to be pretty inconspicous pretending to do my homework while I waited for my friend to finish her Latin Fusion dance class (which you might wanna try - she really likes it).

 

All in all, I had some fun pretening like I was a detective or a spy. Field research can be pretty intensive, so I'm glad this project didn't involve following around criminals while they perform illegal activity or anything like that (some researchers do it!). The only problems I ran into this time were some loud dance music that drowned out some of the conversations, and some construction that I found awaiting me when I went back for a second night of spying.

 

I guess I should mention what my purpose was. I want to write my thesis about mentoring, so my professor and I decided that I should practice some field research looking for instances of mentoring. I found some pretty cool stuff. Turns out I barely heard any females mentoring anyone at all, and the most effective mentoring I observed was male-to-female mentoring. Males mentored each other too, but they were a bit more sarcastic and playfully insulting about it.

 

Maybe you should try out some field research of your own! You never know what you're going to discover.



 

 

 

 

 

 

Click here for more information about the Rock Wall at Ping Recreation Center.