“If you want something, you need to work hard for it”
It has been months since we were assigned a series of exercises in our laboratory class. Which at first I thought that I can’t pull through because the tasks are new for me and it demands a lot of my time. But then, once I looked back on the days that I was conducting those exercises I realized I learned a lot and I grew as a person.
In our document search, I used a couple of tools and skills to accomplish it. I use different platforms and search engines such as Google, OpenAthens, and Google Scholar to find documents and journals that I can use in my development-oriented news story.
I also tested my fact-checking skill with all of the resources that I found because there are times that the sites are not credible and I should not use the information there, for example, Wikipedia. Also, some of the journals or researches are not totally factual because the researcher/s who wrote it is not reliable (I experienced this in my senior high school days), so I made sure to check the author and the publishers before using them.
A research paper has a lot of pages and discussions in it but I only need a few details so skimming and scanning became my way to get the information. It was a good method when I don’t necessarily need to grasp the whole context and it saves me time. There are a lot of research papers and journals that I skimmed and scanned through, which I felt like I already grew sharingans (if you’re an anime person you’ll get the reference) after the tasks.
Next in my task was to collect the answers from my sets of respondents. I made a crowdsourcing post to get the answers from legal-aged customers of jewelry. Fortunately, I collected enough information from the people who answered my questions in my post. Their responses were different from one another which gave me diverse sides of stories.
I observed that it became easier for me to formulate the questions because I clarified my topic outline and objectives for my news story. At first, I was very hesitant if I’ll be able to retrieve sufficient data because my topic seems broad but through the help of the outline and objectives I had concentrated the focus of my questions.
Also, I felt like the brief and concise instructions in my post made it unchallenging for the respondents to answer the questions and they became more open and comfortable to share their stories.
However, I had a hard time reaching and contacting my business owner interviewees. The remote and online setup makes it difficult as I can’t go to their stores or meet them in person. The only means of communication are through email and messaging applications.
I had to visit different Facebook pages of shops to make sure that their business is located in Meycauayan, Bulacan, and then I had to discreetly stalk their Facebook profiles to get some of their personal information. Once I do that, I prepare the letter so I can contact them and set schedules for an interview.
It may look simple but it is the contrary, I experienced being left unread and no replies or they will respond but they won’t return their responses and I didn’t get any answers. I tried another medium to contact them which is through a call. I observed that they’re more responsive when it comes to phone calls, it seems that human interaction even just through voice could really mean a lot.
In my expert interview, it got delayed for two weeks because of her schedule. I pulled plenty of my ways to connect and get in touch with her. I had the chance to have a video call where I asked her questions in regards to my topic. We had a great discussion and I learned a lot from her experiences which I knew that I can use for my news story.
Throughout my journey in collecting and gathering information from document search to interview questions, I had the opportunity to hone my skills and apply the lessons I learned from my classes. For example, being able to check the information if it is true or not, being resourceful in getting the background information of my prospect respondents, and having a plan a to plan z in conducting the retrieval of data.
Most importantly, I learned that in order to achieve the things that I want, I must work hard first. But also I need to be smarter in getting resourceful to my ways and methods. These two became the secret recipe for my accomplishments. There is no easy way of retrieving data for a news story; only patience, perseverance, and dedication can pull it through.
sixtyfifty2021 