I feel that the sequence courses were the most valuable in my academic career. I was very excited to develop and implement my own study on a topic that was personally interesting to me. I chose to examine stereotypes and how it impacted student self-regulation and achievement. Although I do have experience designing studies, the process of actually developing and carrying out my own study from scratch was very difficult. In fact, I became very overwhelmed while developing the theoretical framework of my study. At the time, I was just beginning to look deeper into stereotypes and because of my lack of knowledge about stereotypes, I was basically trying to develop a theory that had already been done. Specifically, I wanted to see if student identification and knowledge of stereotypes pertaining to their ethnic or gender group would impact their academic motivation or engagement in self-regulation processes. In order for me to examine this, I needed to first create a measure. Amidst my frustration, I almost gave up on this idea for practical reasons. However, while browsing  PsycInfo, I stumbled onto an article about stigma consciousness and stereotype internalization. I became very frustrated that I was trying so hard to conceptualize an idea that had already been conceptualized, but relieved at the same time because I can expand on their ideas and use the validated measure.

 
However, I feel that the biggest benefit of this course was listening to how other students in the course were developing their ideas. We all helped each other with the theoretical foundations as well as the methodology. The biggest lesson learned in this course was that no study will ever be perfect. I think this is a very hard lesson to learn because as students, we are always critiquing studies and professors are always critiquing our work. We are trained to question research and when it comes to actually designing and carrying out our own research, we have a difficult time accepting the fact that there will always be problems that cannot be controlled (e.g., available measures, timing, sample size, type of data available).