Sure, the overseas trip is great (and I plan on blogging more about mine soon!), but the one thing from Cornerstone that stuck with me the most is the exposure to undergraduate research that we received. In Cornerstone, the last few months of your freshman year are totally devoted to a research project. BUT, this isn't your typical,-high-school-five-page-requirement, teacher-picks-the-topic-and-you-hate-it research. To illustrate the Cornerstone research project, I'm going to share my experiences, along with those of a fellow Cornerstone student, Kim.
Kim @ the airport during our Cornerstone trip. Hi Kim!
The Cornerstone project is your chance to pick a topic you're in love with and dive head first into the amazing wealth of resources at A&M, emerging a few months later as an expert on a subject with a great presentation and paper to prove it. Your only restriction is that your topic must be somehow related to the overseas trip (in our case, Munich & Vienna). Let's take a look at how we did it...
Katie: My Cornerstone project was about the German education system. I studied its advantages and disadvantages, as well as what the German government is doing to remedy some of the problems in the system.
Kim: My cornerstone research project was about the Grimm Brothers and their influence on the language and folklore of the Bavarian community.
Soo...how did we decide on those topics?
Katie: I’ve been interested in education policy for quite some time. I have a lot of teachers in my family, and it seems as though people are continually criticizing the American school system. I wanted to delve into a foreign system and find out what made their system different from ours.
Kim: I have always loved fairy tales, and I really wanted to trace their roots as far as I could. I was very surprised with what I found. Our idea of fairy tales has morphed from what they originally were.
And how did we feel about our research after it was over?
Katie: I was amazed at the wealth of resources available to me both in Germany and in the libraries here at Texas A&M. Many of Germany’s education policy issues are universal, and the reforms Germany is making were really interesting to compare to those of the United States. I had never been given the opportunity to spend so much time focused on one topic, and I ended up being really proud of my research.
Kim: It was my first college research project, and it was a lot of fun. I loved getting so deep into a topic that I already had a great interest in. It definitely made research enjoyable. I really loved the excuse to spend hours reading all the fairy tales as well!
So, now you have a little more information on what Cornerstone research entails! Stay tuned for "Research, it's Fun! - Part Two" to find out how we continued being involved in undergraduate research after our freshman years were over!
I'll leave you with a few pictures that I took at schools in Germany...
German equivalent of a Montessori preschool
Aren't the little people on the sign so cute? Way better
than our neon yellow signs with stick figures.
Time to go home for the day!
Oh, and a big thank you goes out to Kim for helping me with this post!
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