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oh my god the diversity question everyone hates this question but I’m gonna hopefully give you a guide to how to address it and I hope you enjoy it let’s get to it what’s up everybody so today I got an awesome video for you guys it’s about the diversity question and if you don’t know what the diversity question is I will introduce it in a bit but before we even get started I just want you to all to know that this is a video that’s applicable to anyone applying anywhere right I saw this question why is that applying to college because a bunch of college app people asked this and I also saw this question when I was applying to medical school because a bunch of medical schools asked this so this video is useful for both of those types of students so with that let’s get started what is the diversity question well as I mentioned to already the diversity question is applicable to both college apps which are starting soon and I think they’re starting in August or maybe even September and they’re also applying this question also applies to med school applications which are already out what exactly is the diversity question that’s the number one question you probably have well the diversity question is a question along the lines of how will you increase the diversity of our campus right and it’s usually not as not it’s not put in simple words like that it’s kind of complicated so I’m gonna let me give you some examples okay for some examples University of Michigan Medical School had this prompt on their second year application it says at the University of Michigan Medical School we are committed to building a superb educational community with students our diverse talent talent experiences opinions and backgrounds what would you as an individual bring to our medical school community and then look at NYU’s med school and why you’ve med school said the admissions committee uses a holistic approach to evaluate a wide range of students a wide range of student qualities and life experiences that are complementary complimentary to demonstrated academic excellence what about unique qualities or experiences do you possess that would contribute if eclis to our school that’s it’s exactly the same thing right it’s just asking you how are you gonna increase the diversity of the school more importantly aside from just being asked this when you’re writing up your application the diversity question is also going to be asked if you interview at medical schools or if you interview an undergrad I cannot be more sure of a question that will get asked because this question a lot okay so with that being said let me go let me first take you through the approach many people have when they see this problem and then let me take you through the relevant relevant revelation I had near the end of my application cycle that I personally think helped me and I hope will help you so first of all the tendency here when you address this question the tendency here is most most people like to think of diversity in terms of race sexuality immigrant experiences primarily because that’s kind of the way the educational system talks about diversity right like if you go to your like Office of Diversity Affairs on campus that’s usually about race or sexuality or or some sort of like immigrant experience so we’ve it’s not that it’s bad to think about diversity in terms of that it’s just that most people think of it in that term and that kind of constrains them from thinking about what else it could mean however I’m not saying that I’m not trying to discredit race sex I’m not trying to discredit racial diversity sexual diversity or even even immigrant experiences as diversity those are all really really great if they apply to you but diversity goes beyond this and sometimes just sometimes like myself when you try to stick to these three it really constrains you from seeing what else about you really makes you diverse because I’m sure these three couldn’t that could be the thing that makes you diverse but there’s also other stuff out there that could make you a lot more diverse that you might not have thought of okay and now let me go a bit into why do you why do schools even care so much about diversity right why do they care so much well I think I’m gonna quote the harvard medical school admissions dean because he said you cannot have an orchestra if everyone plays the same instrument right you you if everyone play the same instrument everyone would just sound the same so you want to have a community where everyone is different because you learn a lot more from people that are different I think that’s the number one thing I learned in college like you learn a lot from people that don’t come from the same background as you and that’s because they have a different perspective and learning from that perspective really can enhance your personal I don’t know well being an intellectual ability right so that’s why med schools undergrad schools all these schools care about diversity and with that being said they want to know what niche you’re gonna occupy in the incoming class are you gonna be the class Prez then are you gonna be the one that might not be super talkative but will go out of his or her way for what he’s passing it about are you gonna be the one that kind of helps your classmates whenever they need help what kind of person are you gonna be right because I kid you not when I say this these med schools and undergrad schools the really big ones have hundreds of students that have perfect grades and SAT scores and trust me they don’t need more of them they don’t need a class with perfect grades and SAT scores instead they want a diverse class they want people that are different from each other and in a way that’s great right I take the example here of Steve Jobs Steve Jobs struggled through high school wasn’t the brightest students dropped out of college and even after that he went on to create this massive empire Apple and they based like med schools they want people like Steve Jobs they want to know people who are gonna be different they want people who are passionate about certain things all right so that’s kind of what you want to think about like what niche are you gonna occupy and how does that contribute to the person you are so let me talk about my personal revelation I didn’t have this until like the end of my med school cycle so I don’t want you to think that I knew this going in because then my application I wrote about my immigrant experiences which was not the best way for me to go because I realized diversity is broad right I kept getting asked this diversity question so much in interviews that I thought about it I thought about it and then I I had this revelation because I was like man I don’t have to think about it in terms of just my immigrant experiences I can think about it in terms of my experiences and passions right so what about you is different are you passionate about I don’t know chemistry are you passionate about chemistry if you are how have you shown that passion right cuz if you say you’re passionate about chemistry that’s that’s pretty diverse you know or if you say you’re passionate about I don’t know business and you’re applying a medical school that’s really diverse because now you’re a medical school student applying to medical school with a business background that makes you diverse right and if you’re passionate about X how have you shown your passion about it what did you do to show that right I have some friends who have played musical instruments their whole life and then they applied to med school and the med school loved the fact that they played this musical instrument right similarly you know for me my thing that I reflected on after a really long time of reflection was my big thing that I was passionate about was like changing the pre-med culture changing it into a culture of collaboration rather than call petition that is diverse because there’s this entire culture that clearly has stayed stoic for ages and ages and here I was trying to change that and that’s kind of diverse about me right or even someone one of my friends he’s also pre-med but he’s a rapper whose name fluido Gnaeus check him out but the point is a prima student who’s a rapper like that’s that’s amazing right and now I’m gonna quote a bit from Stanford med school because Stanford med school preaches this whole thing of like you should always be a doctor and X what is that X for you because whatever that X is for you that’s what probably makes you diverse like are you gonna be a doctor and a runner because that’s diverse right are you gonna be a doctor and a I don’t know tech enthusiast right you can think about that in terms of undergrad applications too are you going to be a college student and something else right hell you could even be like a league of Legends all-time player that makes you diverse okay so think about what you are are you a student and X because that X is what makes you diverse so let me give you my personal example my answer when I actually answered this question on paper my answer was just about immigrant experiences and overcoming challenges that’s valid I still respect that a lot but the problem with that is there are a lot of immigrants and that comes across as cliche because how can you be diverse when everyone else says this tells the same story as you that’s not diverse that completely conflicts the meaning of diversity so by the time I was interviewing I got this question a lot I thought about it thought about it and I had this like spark and I was like you know I’m unique because first of all I mentioned to earlier I’m passionate about changing pre-med culture that was the one thing I kind of stuck on to in undergrad and specifically it was in a very entrepreneurial way right I created a club in undergrad which was intended to assist pre-med students and help change the culture I created this very own YouTube channel to do the same thing right and believe it or not I actually created an organic chemistry board game primarily because I knew organic chemistry was so difficult and these three things you know I created them on my own but I realized that they were the underlying thing behind them was this passion to change the culture which is huge right cuz every time I brought this up in an interview and I was like you know I have a YouTube channel they’re like what that’s pretty insane like how many med school students do you know that have a youtube channel or I was like yeah making a board like wait what you’re making a boardgame like what how do you what aren’t you supposed to be doing research or gappi or something like they found that different that’s novel and so it was really surprising to me because the answer was staring me right in the face all along but I never looked at it because my mindset was constrained by what I thought diversity meant but it can actually mean a lot more than that okay and when I brought it up in interviews as I mentioned to you I got good reactions so just some last minute tips if you’re trying to address this question think about where you see yourself in your future class as I mentioned to you everyone should be a doctor and something else what is that something else for you are you the person who’s gonna go out of your way to be class president lead your class are you gonna be the person that’s gonna promote some sort of I don’t know are you super passionate about I don’t know clean water bottles you could be something that something as small as that is huge okay because something like that is gonna set you apart and that’s what these people are looking for not necessarily in terms of sex sexuality race or even your immigrant experiences but maybe in terms of anything you’ve done in college that has reflected the type of person you are and last but not least if you’re watching this video and you aren’t applying take this video to heart you can build on what I told you here by actually recognizing what your passions are and building on them right focus on aspects of your personality that you see as different and make it happen I have two younger cousin brothers right now that have their own YouTube channel and they’re like they’re just grinding and they’re grinding because they love it right like that’s unique to me I’m like Dean you guys are like a bleep down there in high school but that’s like that takes a lot of guts for them to do that right I have another younger brother right now and he’s like working with his dad to make a game and like that’s pretty awesome so think about what’s gonna make you different and go after that okay and the general belief is it’s much better to be really good at one thing than to be somewhat good at a lot of things and that’s the one thing that a lot of people think they need to do everything know if you can do one thing really really well and kind of elaborate on it through your experiences you will be much more willing to write about it because now you have this underlying theme throughout your application but by no means am i advocating that you change your entire passion or your entire life to try to match one goal if you’re interested if you don’t know what you’re interested in yet by all means explore it but if you know what your passion is stick to it promise you it’s gonna be really really great for you stick to developing in unique ways don’t just like do the traditional router you know like some people are like I’m passionate about community service I’m president my community service club and I’m like all right but I anyone can do that anyone can become president that’s a traditional hierarchy do something else what kind of service are you interested in are you interested in service to the elderly start a club that serves the elderly you know go to the elderly go to a clinic nearby and like see if you can organize a partnership like try to think of new ways to address your costs because that will truly truly set you apart and with that I hope you guys enjoyed the video this is my two cents of how to address that diversity question and please let me know if you have any questions like comment subscribe and I’ll see you guys in the next video thanks for watching

this video is intended to show you the basics of what we call APA style and and teach you how to apply those basics to an academic paper so we’re gonna walk through what these basics of APA might be and then we’re actually going to apply them to a paper I’ll take a paper and I’ll actually format it according to APA style so what is APA style to begin with well first of all APA means the American Psychological Association and APA style establishes standards of written communication within an essay why the American Psychological Association developed this style while they developed it because they wanted standards of written communication but I’ll explain that in just a second but why do you use the style determined by the American Psychological Association I don’t know just happened that way but anyway it it established the standards concerning in-text citation right which is source introductions and parenthetical citations and it also establishes standards concerning listing your references right how you do that what style it’s in how you format it and punctuate it and it also concerns how do you format the paper as a whole and that’s actually what we’re gonna focus on if you want to learn more about in-text citation and listing references you can check out a video that I created called how to avoid plagiarism okay so again these standards concerning written communication right well there’s a lot of different approaches although the three main styles at most US universities use one of them is called APA style one of them is called MLA and one of them is called the Chicago style and these three different styles again they’re just different ways of establishing standards to written communication why standardized written communication well it makes it easier for your instructors to grade your work across courses within a discipline and disciplines within a university so everybody is giving more fair and objective grades based on how things are presented it also makes it easier know how your instructors want you to present your work because there’s some sort of standard across disciplines what this allows your instructors to do is focus more on the content of their ideas the strength of your ideas and less on how all of this looks in the form of a paper so who uses APA well obviously it was established by the American Psychological Association so it was established to standardize psychology research papers right but then it’s grown far beyond it obviously because you’re using so it APA style describes rules for writing in this and the social sciences or what we might call the soft science it’s not the hard sciences like physics and and chemistry and mathematics but psychology linguistics sociology etc it’s also expanded beyond that into fields such as business and nursing and other disciplines to the point where it’s actually standard practice and many undergraduate programs in the United States it’s not the only style used by undergraduate programs these all three of these are used pretty broadly but it’s definitely used quite widely which is also why you’re using it today so now we’re gonna turn our attention to an actual paper and how if I was using APA style how I would format that paper so let’s take a look first of all so this is this is a completely written paper it’s got all of its citations in it it’s got all of its analysis it’s got a strong thesis statement it’s got paraphrases from from outside sources it’s got quotations it’s got all of the things that the paper needs from a Content perspective all it needs now to be in accordance with APA is to be formatted properly so let’s go ahead and walk through that step by step so let’s go ahead and start with your heading this is what’s at the top of the page that identifies the paper yours there are clearly other things that you can do that are even in accordance with APA style that I’m not gonna ask you to do today but as far as I’m concerned you’re heading needs to be right justified it needs to be formal it needs to have the following contents of the name the course label there’s name in the dates of them so let’s go ahead and do that okay first of all right justified and for them it okay so I’m gonna zoom in obviously so we can we can focus a little bit more on what you see here okay let’s hit enter and I’m gonna right justify this by clicking on that right justified that second thing is it has to be formal so I’m gonna go ahead and add a formal version of my name so Michael and the next thing that it asks for is the course labeled in the instructors name and the date that it was submitted so the course label was F D 101 you could all you’ll even say section o then the instructors name in this case mr. Shawn yeah and then the date that it was submitted in a formal capacitor so December 14 2007 let’s say okay so that’s the first section of this is to add your your heading and that would be the full heading right don’t list it as a twelve fourteen twenty seventeen or twelve fourteen twelve seventeen or anything like that it should look a lot like this in a formal way okay the next thing we want to want to do is add a title right and this is what we want to look for in a title you always use title case right so most of the words at this title case are capitalized the only things that aren’t or prepositions like on or through articles like a and the and conjunctions like but and or also if a preposition an article or a conjunction starts your title then you should capitalize it as what kind of like D is capitalized here because it’s the first word in the title of this slide you also do not want to bold do not want to underline or write sighs any parts of your title it should be centered right and it should be right underneath the heading but above your paper right then it should be specific but it should also be a little bit prosaic it shouldn’t just be as specific as as possible but it also shouldn’t be very general like synthesis essay or compare and contrast essay so let’s take a look at this one so we want to put it in between your essay and your heading you wanted to be Center justified specific includes aook and using title case okay so this this is an essay about animal therapy and its benefits okay specific a little bit prosaic it’s not just animal therapy if you’ll notice there’s no extra spaces between the bottom of your heading and the top of your title there’s no extra spaces between the bottom of your title and the top your essay just that okay mmm okay so now we have a title on there and a heading okay now the font and font size is actually correct as we look at it right now it’s Times New Roman twelve point five if you want to take a look at that Times New Roman twelve point five that’s how it should look okay one of the things you have to do is add your list of references then I’ve actually used if you watch my video on how to avoid plagiarism I’ve used Microsoft Word software in order to develop that list of references don’t find out how to do that in that other video but your list of references should come after the end of your essay it should be on its own page so you should actually use page break formatting there it should be titled references it should be and that title of references should be Center justified on its own line the sources should be listed in alphabetical order and it should be reverse indent so let’s let’s look at all of those types of things in kind of in orbit the first thing we need to do is come down here to the bottom of our essay you can like I said put it on its own page by clicking a page set up and going to break and choosing a page break and that’ll add it to a new page so you’ll be at the top of a new page this is good because even if you’re creating the text on your right on your essay here it actually doesn’t affect the the space in here it doesn’t push it up or push your pelvis this page will always be its own page and to start your references on a new page really helps to clarify that it’s different from your essay and it helps to make sure that it’s really clear where it’s stuck let’s go ahead and add in that list of references that I created within this one software like bonus here click the bibliography button here we’ll actually edit it ok so now we’ve added both of our sources are the two sources in this paper about here okay now one of the things that I noted before now that we’ve got it here is hey we want this to all be even times we want we want it all to be 12.5 you want it all to be black all cannot be bolded you do not bold the top of this in fact we want to retitle this as references okay we also want to center justify just this top part that’s starting to look right but it’s actually not right just yet because we want to actually reverse indent this as well so the way to do that is to hit enter and then hit the tab light all right that’ll do the first line you actually want to do the second line of an entry as well this time you don’t have to enter you can just hit tab another pocket over so I do the same thing so here’s the second line of that second reference that enter tab a second line of this hit okay so the reason that we do this remember is indented is because that makes it really clear and easy to see the difference between our different references and read those it’s also really helpful because first part of any references in fact the first part of its parenthetical citation so you can you can really easily identify other stuff but in that’s right or in your sourcing I’ve actually I guess it could be resourcing about you where your parenthetical citation right dr. stone Spencer which one is that oh it’s dr. East are these things your back yeah so it makes that really easy right okay so let’s go back here is it after the NS a yes is it on its own page using page break yeah since the titled references it’s that Center justified on its own mind yep are the sources listed in alphabetical order yep Daughtry amendment Yousef and then is it reverse into it yes okay so my references look for that again if you’ll notice there’s no space extra space between the bottom of the title of references and the first reference and also there’s no extra space between events okay so okay now we’re gonna look at that when we have a look at margin in space so it should be one inch on all sides of your paper the entire essay should be double-spaced there should be no spacing between paragraphs and all paragraphs should be indented so let’s go ahead and apply that okay first of all I think it’s already one inch on all sides you can look at the left one one oh my goodness now the left and right margins are them 25 inches so we’ve gotta fix that mmm I would select all of it okay that’s one inch once one inch if you’re using centimeters look up the conversion to give you okay so the next thing is so we’ve got a one inch on our sides we need it to be double spaced actually there’s a really easy way to double space everything that I say and I mean everything from the in the heading to the references you just take time control and — there are different commands if you using a Mac again look it up if it doesn’t work for you but double spacing is actually really easy so everything is highlighted here and we want to say control — and it bounces out — double spacing this makes up a lot easier to read in a lot of cases and also makes it easier that can print it out for your instructors — to write notes in between the lines okay so we need to do is make sure that there’s no extra spacing between the paragraphs and then we need to indentify any spaces in between these pets no there’s no extra spaces between these paragraphs great so now we need to indent each pair and you can do that again with the tab the tab key tab ones you can actually also if you want to change a pack click obviously control Z but you can put shift tab to move it back the other way let’s go back up to the top one tab that over that this one’s tagged over to show the paragraph and again you show the difference between your paragraphs really clearly right now it’s not so clear but once we apply indenting it’ll make it clearer where each paragraph starts this is another place to tell it’s not so clear but right one thing that you’ll know is it if you have chosen a tenant’s not the place to do it and I’ll actually bump everything over if you’re doing this right [Music] [Music] now we’re down in our efforts is together if you want it’s because you did the page rate we did double spacing it didn’t it didn’t change your references list from being still at the very top of this very last page which is really bad for okay so now as far as margins of spacing this is one inch on all sides it’s double spaced there’s no spacing between the paragraphs and paragraphs are each indented so let’s let the zoom out because actually that’s all that you’re being asked to do as far as clean feel so let’s say that that’s a 50% okay if we’re looking this is our paper from the widest angle possible this actually looks perfectly formatted as far as I am concerned that’s good yeah so anyway I know that what I’ve told you today it’s pretty readily accepted across different courses as being in concordance for thank you style but you always need to check with your instructor to instructor might have a little bit different way of interpreting a few in style but if you start doing this and you start doing it often and you started really really focusing on it um you’re gonna learn to attend to the details of both what APA asks for in general and what your specific an instructor wants which will make it a lot easier to do this

the literature review provides the rationale for your research topic it should give an overview of the current research on that topic making sure now that your readers understand why your topic is an important or significant problem to research it should also just identify any gaps in the research and this is important because it shows why your topic is significant and why time should be taken to investigate your research problem now your literature review should also review relevant methodologies which will show how the research is to be done and what you can do for your own research design to investigate your research problem in this lesson we’re going to define literature review and the concepts that are required for completing a literature review I’m going to introduce to you some resources that would help you understand the differences between a theoretical framework and a conceptual framework and then I want you to be able to apply the five-step process for completing a literature review for your thesis proposal even though the literature review is really the hallmark of a scholarly research we see it done in journal articles and government reports and certainly in dissertations and theses a lot of students may have difficulty defining what is a literature review and furthermore students may even find it challenging to synthesize works in a literature review and that’s not really able to write a coherent review and above all my experience in working with undergraduate and graduate students it’s shown me that students often have difficulty with the structure of the literature review they typically write a series of unrelated paragraphs each of which just summarizes one of the works reviewed rather than actually integrating the analysis of all of the sources together themes or headings I really want to make sure that you understand what a literature review entails and one a video that really helped me as a graduate student was from the librarians at North Carolina State University and I want to share with you how they define a literature review because it fits beautifully for extension education agricultural communications agricultural education or failing consumer science education and what we expect of many of our graduate students let’s just take a moment and listen to these librarians explain what is involved in a literature review writing a literature review is an inevitable part of being a graduate student so before spending hours of your time working on a project involving a literature review it helps to understand what a literature review is and why it is important you may need to do a literature review as a part of a course assignment a capstone project or a master’s thesis or dissertation no matter the context a literature review is an essential part of the research process some important functions of a literature review are that it helps you to understand a research topic and develop your own perspective on a problem not only that it lets you show your instructor or thesis committee what you know about the topic your instructor or advisor may assume you know what a literature review is and that you understand what they are expecting from you you might hear phrases like what does the literature show us connect your ideas to the literature survey the literature on the topic well before you can review the literature you need to make sure you know what is meant by the literature a good definition of the literature is that it is a collection of all the scholarly writings on a topic these writings can be in the form of scholarly peer reviewed articles books and other sources like conference proceedings these may be called annual meetings or conventions the literature also includes dissertations written by other graduate students collectively these make up the literature visual okay what I want to share with you now is a little bit more detail about how to go about finding those sources of scholarly articles the conference proceedings the books the dissertations that are going to help you complete your own literature review but to do that I want to introduce to you a five-step process that can really help you prepare right for writing a literature review and the first you need to search for existing literature in your area of study really focusing on finding information that’s gonna address your research problem and objectives it’s really important to stay focused I find a lot of times the graduate students wander and write about everything they possibly can find about the topic rather than always going back and asking themselves does this relate to my research problem does this answer one of my research questions what have other researchers done that I can learn from to be able to address my questions or my objectives of my study second you’re gonna have to critically assess the literature that you find to determine if that information is accurate and reliable enough to include in your literature review third you’re gonna develop a theoretical framework and/or conceptual framework some masters theses and dissertations will have only a theoretical framework so will have only a conceptual framework and a few might have both a theoretical framework and a conceptual framework and it’s really important that you work with your committee chair on determining what type of framework you need to include in your thesis proposal fourth you’re gonna create an outline of your theory and the existing research that addresses your research problem statement and your objectives it’s really gonna help you break down your content into specific headings and help guide you in writing your literature review so that you do remain focused and then lastly you’re gonna write your literature of you which is roughly 25 to 30 pages in length and I’m going to go through each of these steps in further detail so you understand a bit more about the procedures I’m going to show you some methods of collecting and organizing your sources I want to make sure you understand that when writing a master’s thesis proposal or master’s thesis you really need to use primary sources these are original reports journal articles that have been peer-reviewed that unpublished and monthly or quarterly journals or conference proceedings you may find a little bit of value and a secondary source like a book that would refer to a statistical method a data analysis procedure maybe a theoretical framework insight that in your master’s thesis but for the most part you stay away from secondary sources because they are referring to the primary sources and these authors are publishing articles and cyclopædia or books that are about those primary sources and one problem I always have is that secondary their secondary sources can report information wrong or they may provide insufficient details I have found far too many students will just read an article say I love that source paraphrase with that secondary author says rather than going and finding the primary source of information yeah it does take more time to find that primary source but by you reading it interpreting it and writing it in your own words you’re gonna prevent any misinformation misunderstanding a lack of detail or plagiarism and so I want you to focus on finding primary sources for your theoretical framework and review of literature now how do you go about doing this what I like to recommend my students to do is to formulate a list of search terms that are going to be relevant to your there’s prom and your objectives or research questions or hypotheses and depending on your structure of your study and as you find articles and theses about your research poems collect a natural list of terms that you can use for finding your information so for example my master’s thesis surveyed Ohio corn and wheat growers to predict their willingness to adopt organic farming practices since consumer demand for granite organic grains and processed foods was growing and I wanted to use two theories the theory of planned behavior and the diffusion of innovations so I developed a number of search terms that included organic farming organic agriculture organic wheat organic corn the theory of planned behavior the diffusion of innovations adoption of organic Road crops attitude toward organic farm barriers to adopting organic farming and then benefits of adopting organic agriculture and I would type then these search terms in a number of queries to actually search journals to search databases to find conference proceedings with fine and typing as keyword and see if I can identify a relevant article for my study so one place I would recommend you doing is to use your search terms and create queries for the journals that are relevant to your research problem and objectives some of the journals that are very popular in our disciplines would include the Journal of agricultural education or the Journal of extension the Journal of applied communications the Journal of agricultural education and extension the Journal of Family and Consumer Science education and the Family and Consumer Science Research Journal however I don’t want you to just limit yourself to these journals because there’s more research being published than what’s in your discipline that can relate to your research prob so going back to my example of my master’s thesis I’m going to look at farmers adoption of organic farming practices for corn and wheat I referenced articles that used diffusion of innovations and the theory of planned behavior from the journal of rural studies American Journal of alternative agriculture agriculture and human values the Journal of sustainable agriculture and the Journal of agricultural environmental ethics I had to go outside of my discipline to truly find all of the necessary research that would cover my topic thoroughly enough that would let me form my review of existing literature as well as my theoretical framework so I could investigate my research problem so while these are amazing scholarly journals in our discipline I do not want you to feel compelled to only use them you need to step outside of our discipline and look at these problems holistically and how other researchers from other disciplines would also study something similarly so that you get a real big picture of what has already been done I also want you to search some databases and Utah State University has an amazing library catalog of articles and databases available for us to use I have used ProQuest dissertations and theses to find other dissertations and theses from universities like Iowa State University University of Florida Texas A&M; the Ohio State University University of nebraska-lincoln that have been about my topics and it’s really great to look and see how another graduate student has looked at that topic what sources have been I did what information has been learned during that research process and be able to possibly use that source of information or use their reference list as places to go for possible sources I also searched my key terms in academic premier and Eric ScienceDirect or JSTOR all of these databases contain a plethora of journals that are available and helpful for our disciplines you can also identify some possible databases by your subject area so if you’re not very familiar with the databases type in agriculture or Applied Economics or communication or education and see what databases are found and then search those databases to help you gather the journal articles because simply doing a Google Scholar search is not enough when it comes to a master’s thesis and I don’t want us to be limited by what Google allows us to find I want you to be able to go to these databases find journal articles and be able to even request borrowing them so that you have access to the research that can help you write your realtor review you can also search conference proceedings from the different associations that graduate students can belong to within our discipline I happen to be a member of the American Association for agricultural education the Association for communication excellence and the Southern Association for agricultural scientists all of those associations have our cultural communications and have conference proceedings so I will login I will download those conference proceedings and I search for key terms that might be relevant because these are studies that are being done within the last few years before they’ve gone to a journal article and so you’re gonna have very current findings you can maybe check with your chair if you can get access to some of these conference proceedings or perhaps if your student member log in and access them but maybe their committee members would have some ideas places that you can search for sources that are not necessarily just journals I do want to give a word of caution newspapers magazines and radio stories can provide some limited information relevant to a literature review and they can give some insight into the recent trends discoveries maybe changes that can be relevant to your research problem and you might be able to cite them in your introduction or perhaps in the significance of why your problem is being studied but it’s not really the most appropriate place to have them in the literature review they might give you that background you need for chapter one to justify why you need to study the topic that you’re studying I also want you to do one other thing check the reference list so the sources you locate to find some additional sources I love going back to a journal article and then looking at their references and seeing seeing then if I can find additional sources and do those searches and find those articles and read the abstracts to see if those studies would help in writing a literature review and I would encourage you to do the same because that can help cut down a little bit of your workload and relying on existing tools they are to help you in finding information and I always want to make sure you understand that you never assume that you’re going to read everything related to your research so the great thing to do is to maintain a search record of the key terms and places that you have gone to find information and then you can help share that information with your chair and the colleges reference librarian so they know what you’ve done and then they may be able to suggest additional sources for you if you tell them oh I’ve done a literature review and you can’t tell them the search terms you can’t tell them the journals you can’t tell them the databases that you’ve done have you really done a thorough job researching your topic because you are the expert and your chair and your committee are mentors and guides that are going to help you but we gotta know what you’ve done so that we can make sure we’re suggesting new things and not being in repetitive in the search process so I keep a journal when I’m doing my research studies I have a great book I carry it with me and for every research study I do I maintain records that are gonna help be able to track what’s been done and what’s missing and then I can go to colleagues and ask for suggestions when I need help and I certainly did this as a master’s degree student and as a doctoral student because it really gave me a way to structure conversations with my committee chair and my colleagues so that I was not wasting time but that I was drafting a really well-written literature review