My Final Thoughts

I have always liked doing research projects for classes; I feel that I learn more when I have the ability to research the information on my own and not just sit in a class taking notes on various topics. However, every person I have ever researched has died and is more widely known to the general public, but researching the life and work of someone who is still living and actively involved in the community has been much more interesting. Even though I have not had a lot of contact with Dr. Blau I feel that I have more connections with her than people I have previously studied because she is living in the same time period that I am and has witnessed some of the changes and events in the world that I have also witnessed. One thing I learned by doing this project is that it is extremely difficult to read through the material that I found because of basic time constraints and because there is so much that could possibly be read that it is hard to decide which will be relevant to a project of this type. For this reason I have gained more respect for sociologists and will always remember the stressful days of trying to figure out where I should start. I also think that the work of Dr. Judith Blau is very relevant because it shows that she genuinely cares about problems we have not only here, but in other countries as well. She has shown this by writing the series of books on human rights, race and education and by combining the works of several academics from different countries into one journal (Societies without Borders). I think that her work is interesting because it is like nothing we have studied before and has little overlap with what we have already read for the class. Although, the overlap is important in order to see how she connects to our class and what we are studying.