Francis Laflamme
FINAL REFLECTION PAPER #2
The greatest thing that I learned Social Science student is the importance of proper
research. I have learned that research is the key to writing good papers and amassing knowledge
in general. Identifying adequate sources and deciphering complex scientific articles are skills I
find invaluable and will keep using for the rest of my life. More specifically, being able to work
databases to find exactly what I am looking for and understand scholarly articles that were very
difficult to grasp at first. Often, these articles are filled with complex terms, graphs, and tables,
and have an awkward format. This was what I thought when I first started researching articles for
a course, I was not able to properly analyze the content of the articles I researched and in turn, I
was unable to provide enough depth on the topic of the paper linked to the research. Another
skill I learned related to research is the ability to transfer the information read in articles to a
written assignment without plagiarizing or being too vague. The latter was something I learned
recently in the Integrative Seminar course where I had to be as specific as possible and fully
utilize the material I had researched and analyzed.
The piece of advice I would give to a student starting their Integrative Seminar course is
to learn to embrace reading as you will be doing a whole lot of it in this course! I do not mean
this in a negative way however, the importance of being a good reader is crucial in this course. It
is an integral part of the course along with extensive research and analysis of texts. For me, this
was the best part of the course, getting to know more about my main topic and analyzing dozens
of scholarly sources to help me provide better arguments and details for my final paper. Also, try
to pick a topic that you know very little about, it is much more interesting to do the main course
project while learning about a global issue, dilemma, or any other subject that you will choose.
Integrative Seminar is a great course that gives you the most tools to become a great researcher
and also helps you understand how much work goes into writing proper scholarly articles.