A Semester of Firsts

In Peopling of New Your City, I completed assignments for which I was required to learn new skills.  The two most challenging assingments were the statistical profile and the immigrant interview projects.  The statistical profile required analyzing data and turning it into graphs, and I noticed that it was sometimes difficult to not just restate the data in the graphs in my paper, but also to go one step further and to determine why a certain group of people has the english profiency, wages, or employment rate that the graphs represent.  The interview with an immigrant was particularly interesting, because instead of learning something from a book, I was given the oppertunity to connect with another human being and hear their story.  However, the challenging part consisted of trying to come up with questions that will not lead to “yes or no answers,” but rather open-ended questions that solicity responses filled with details that are useful for the subject of your paper.  Overall, I think that what I learned about conducting interviews and creating and analyzing graphs, charts, and tables will stay with me and be very useful in future classes.