We were interviewing the Professor of Communication. His name was Professor Lindemann. As we knocked on the door, excitement built up in me. The last professor I interviewed was Professor Flanigan for the department of Public Affairs. I didn’t know that college professors were so nice and friendly. I thought they gave a bunch of tests, essays and papers to all their students and that was it. I was hoping this person would be as nice as the other one. I almost jumped when an invisible hand pulled the door open from the other side of the door.
Professor Lindemann led us to a big conference room to talk. When we found that a bunch of villagers were taking a test there, we went to another area that was a bit smaller. Then we started our interview. It turned out like the last professor that he got into communication with his dad. His dad got paralyzed in a motorcycle race when Lindemann was seven years old. Then he noticed that his dad started to communicate differently around other people. From these basics, Lindemann gained an interest for communication. These are some of the questions he answered also:
1.What do we need to do to make our research ethical?
2.What makes a good research question?
3.What is action research?
4.How do academics share their research?
And a few others.
This was his answer for the first question “What do we need to do to make our research ethical?”:
“I think that there are 3 steps for doing ethical tests. 1st you need to always tell the leader or principal or director what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. 2nd you need to explain what you did or what your going to do before or after you observe them. 3rd you need to share your results to the people you were observing."
I learned that that you should share your results with the people you observed on. I had never thought of this before.
This was his answer for the second question “What makes a good research question?”:
“A good research question has to be specific, simple, it helps you understand something, and it can’t be a yes or no question.” I learned from this answer that sometimes a good research question can be simple.
This was his answer for the 3rd question “What is action research?”: “ Action research is research where you're doing research while helping other people. This is basically what the other professor talked about how action research is where you are in the group or person you're researching on.
This was his answer for the fourth question “ How do academics share their research?”: “ I share my research by presenting simple short presentations to people because only us academics read long, fact filled, books full of information” This answer was simple to me because I get bored of long books full of complicated words and hours of information.
A very interesting thing to me is that Lindemann did action research on people who were in a wheelchair and played basket ball. He talked to them while taking notes. Did he want to research about this because of his dad?
Another very interesting thing to me was how he researched how other kids reacted when a kid was getting bullied by another kid. This was very interesting to me because I've never thought about how other kids reacted to a kid getting bullied. I’ve always thought about how the person who was getting bullied would react.
This is what really stuck in my mind: The interesting parts like that he got into communication because of his dad communicating differently than he used to because he was in a wheel chair. Another thing is sometimes he lies to the people he was observing on then at the end tells them what he was actually doing (which is usually observing and writing notes). This is interesting to me because I didn’t know that college professors lied even temporarily. I think that next time I interview a professor I should fake that I am not shy because when you're more shy you're less professional and I did not want to look that I wasn't professional. I really hope we can do more field work for research this year.
By Seth