Hi everyone!
As many of you know, I am participating in a year-long research project as a part of my recent study-abroad trip. The trip focused on common issues in the 21st Century, and you can read all about it and my adventures here (http://rachelstraveljournal.wordpress.com/). A major part of participating in this study abroad trip was taking a spring semester class before leaving and now taking a fall semester capstone class. This has been a year-long program and I am now 2/3 done with it.
A big part of being in this program is completing a research project. I started my project last semester and am now trying to finish it up. The topic is homelessness. I have gone back and forth on what specifically about homelessness I want to focus on, because it turns out that it is a very broad topic. I eventually concluded that I would focus on natural disasters and displacement-induced homelessness.
This is still more or less what I want to study, but I have found that it’s very hard to research something if you don’t have a lot of first-hand experience with it. While I have had a lot of experience volunteering with a multitude of poverty and homeless organizations, I have virtually no experience whatsoever with natural disasters.
I still want to focus on that, but I also want to incorporate a social aspect, as I do have a lot more personal experiences on social views of the homeless and it is well within my range of knowledge and capacity to gather data. This blog is going to focus more on the research that I have done and less on the awesome trip that went along with it. While the primary reason for my blog is to organize my research for this class, I am and have always been very interested in studying homelessness and hope to continue to be able to long after this program is over. Hence the name of the title. It incorporates my interest in this topic of research, as well as my desire to continue to travel around the world.
If you ever have any information, data, or cool media/pictures/videos/stories related to homelessness, please share them!
I would also appreciate it if you all would take a quick survey I made about your general knowledge of homelessness in your hometown area. That can be accessed at this linK: https://survey.vt.edu/survey/entry.jsp?id=1410225800827
Thanks for reading!
As many of you know, I am participating in a year-long research project as a part of my recent study-abroad trip. The trip focused on common issues in the 21st Century, and you can read all about it and my adventures here (http://rachelstraveljournal.wordpress.com/). A major part of participating in this study abroad trip was taking a spring semester class before leaving and now taking a fall semester capstone class. This has been a year-long program and I am now 2/3 done with it.
A big part of being in this program is completing a research project. I started my project last semester and am now trying to finish it up. The topic is homelessness. I have gone back and forth on what specifically about homelessness I want to focus on, because it turns out that it is a very broad topic. I eventually concluded that I would focus on natural disasters and displacement-induced homelessness.
This is still more or less what I want to study, but I have found that it’s very hard to research something if you don’t have a lot of first-hand experience with it. While I have had a lot of experience volunteering with a multitude of poverty and homeless organizations, I have virtually no experience whatsoever with natural disasters.
I still want to focus on that, but I also want to incorporate a social aspect, as I do have a lot more personal experiences on social views of the homeless and it is well within my range of knowledge and capacity to gather data. This blog is going to focus more on the research that I have done and less on the awesome trip that went along with it. While the primary reason for my blog is to organize my research for this class, I am and have always been very interested in studying homelessness and hope to continue to be able to long after this program is over. Hence the name of the title. It incorporates my interest in this topic of research, as well as my desire to continue to travel around the world.
If you ever have any information, data, or cool media/pictures/videos/stories related to homelessness, please share them!
I would also appreciate it if you all would take a quick survey I made about your general knowledge of homelessness in your hometown area. That can be accessed at this linK: https://survey.vt.edu/survey/entry.jsp?id=1410225800827
Thanks for reading!