Honors Independent Study:
Documentation Binder Human Trafficking
Project Reflection:
As an honors project for the first semester of Junior year, I had to study a topic/research question, and create a documentation binder and visual piece showing what I learned throughout my research. I chose to study human trafficking in women and children, and compare this issue between the US and developing countries. I have always been interested in this topic, and want to help women involved in trafficking in Africa; so I was motivated to study this topic and get background knowledge I may need when working in this area. My initial research questions were asking how does trafficking in the US differ from in developing countries, does education play a role in keeping women out of trafficking, and how are women caught and forced into prostitution and trafficking. I studied these questions and more throughout my research.
Through researching this topic and doing this project I learned a lot about what women go through when sold into prostitution, how they are imprisoned, and especially how giving women an education can save them from this life. It was very challenging to hear some of these women's stories, and know that many other women are going through the same things right now, and not be able to help or do anything about it. I learned throughout all of this how deep my passion for helping people is, and that I want to be able to work with young girls in developing countries to help keep them out of a life of prostitution. By doing this project I feel like I am more prepared heading into college to be able to research and do big projects on my own. This project tested my perseverance a lot, but working through that helped to grow this skill for the future.
A revision I would make to this project is starting out the research I would have thought through more and figured out a clear understanding of what questions I would be answering through this project. For the first bit of the semester I spent a lot of time just going through different questions and ideas related to human trafficking, but couldn’t figure out exactly what I wanted to be researching. As time went on I was able to find the topics that seemed the most important to me. Towards the end of the project I focused the most on how education plays a role in keeping girls out of trafficking through getting them other jobs that require an education. If I could do this project again I would make a very clear research question after researching a little bit, rather than make many questions to answer and end up wasting some time figuring out what I want to focus on. Another revision I would make is working on my procrastination, I had a lot of other school work to do so by the time I was finished with that, I would have no more energy to work on the honors project. I would try to make a more clear plan of when exactly I would work on honors, this would have given me more time to refine the documentation binder and work on things like sentence structure and organization.
If you are a future honors student I would suggest not procrastinating on this project. Last years juniors told me the same thing going into this project and I thought I would be fine just working a little bit on the project at the beginning of the semester, but found out later I was wrong and ended up working really hard towards the end of the project to get everything done. I would suggest planning on spending just 10-20 minutes extra each day to work on this project, it does not seem like a lot but you can slowly get things done this way and wont end up scrambling at the end of the project to get everything finished and you will be more proud of not only your project, but what you did to finish it.
As an honors project for the first semester of Junior year, I had to study a topic/research question, and create a documentation binder and visual piece showing what I learned throughout my research. I chose to study human trafficking in women and children, and compare this issue between the US and developing countries. I have always been interested in this topic, and want to help women involved in trafficking in Africa; so I was motivated to study this topic and get background knowledge I may need when working in this area. My initial research questions were asking how does trafficking in the US differ from in developing countries, does education play a role in keeping women out of trafficking, and how are women caught and forced into prostitution and trafficking. I studied these questions and more throughout my research.
Through researching this topic and doing this project I learned a lot about what women go through when sold into prostitution, how they are imprisoned, and especially how giving women an education can save them from this life. It was very challenging to hear some of these women's stories, and know that many other women are going through the same things right now, and not be able to help or do anything about it. I learned throughout all of this how deep my passion for helping people is, and that I want to be able to work with young girls in developing countries to help keep them out of a life of prostitution. By doing this project I feel like I am more prepared heading into college to be able to research and do big projects on my own. This project tested my perseverance a lot, but working through that helped to grow this skill for the future.
A revision I would make to this project is starting out the research I would have thought through more and figured out a clear understanding of what questions I would be answering through this project. For the first bit of the semester I spent a lot of time just going through different questions and ideas related to human trafficking, but couldn’t figure out exactly what I wanted to be researching. As time went on I was able to find the topics that seemed the most important to me. Towards the end of the project I focused the most on how education plays a role in keeping girls out of trafficking through getting them other jobs that require an education. If I could do this project again I would make a very clear research question after researching a little bit, rather than make many questions to answer and end up wasting some time figuring out what I want to focus on. Another revision I would make is working on my procrastination, I had a lot of other school work to do so by the time I was finished with that, I would have no more energy to work on the honors project. I would try to make a more clear plan of when exactly I would work on honors, this would have given me more time to refine the documentation binder and work on things like sentence structure and organization.
If you are a future honors student I would suggest not procrastinating on this project. Last years juniors told me the same thing going into this project and I thought I would be fine just working a little bit on the project at the beginning of the semester, but found out later I was wrong and ended up working really hard towards the end of the project to get everything done. I would suggest planning on spending just 10-20 minutes extra each day to work on this project, it does not seem like a lot but you can slowly get things done this way and wont end up scrambling at the end of the project to get everything finished and you will be more proud of not only your project, but what you did to finish it.