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The research
component of your semester takes you inside the world of community improvement
as you explore an issue that particularly interests you. Under the
guidance of your professor, you use Washington, D.C., as a resource laboratory
to gather data from interviews with social innovators and policy makers.
Your sources will be both primary and secondary. Primary sources can
include interviews with experts in community development, affordable housing,
and other related areas; secondary sources can include studies of active
community programs, current news articles and court reports, legal and
congressional proceedings, and the Library of Congress. Washington offers
unparalleled opportunities for compiling the most up-to-date facts.
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 Whether or not
you design your research project topic and methodology with guidance from an
instructor at your home school, when you arrive in Washington, a member of
the American University faculty works with you in refining your topic and
providing advice and feedback at various stages of your project. Of
course, you have full access to the university's computer labs and library
to help you complete your paper. The research project is your
opportunity explore an issue in transforming communities at a level of
scrutiny only D.C. can offer. You become an expert in the topic you
choose to research.
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Throughout
Washington Semester, I learned and took in so much that I needed an
outlet in which I could apply it and put it all together in my mind. In
that regard the research project was perfect, since it drew on my own
strengths and individual ways of understanding the world. Having a
caring and intelligent professor's guidance made it all the more
worthwhile, for he did not pretend to have all the answers for me to
learn passively, but became rather an active partner in scholarship and
intellectual discovery.
Jimmy
Stillwell, Harvard University |
