Breakthrough! (Day Eighteen)

So this morning my team sat down in a conference room to tackle our task of defining meaningful engagement.

The first five minutes consisted of us goofing off.

The next ten minutes consisted of us deciding that our task was impossible. How the heck were we supposed to define something that no one else has ever effectively defined in the entire recorded history of social science? What kind of definition were they even looking for? Did they not realize that we’re engineers and scientists, not museum people or philosophers? And on top of all that, this was for our IQP—a project which almost always consisted of a tried-and-true method being applied to a specific scenario. Not of making up something entirely new that’s hardly ever been hinted at before.

We finally came to the conclusion that we just needed to come up with something, and we could figure out later whether it was good or right. We just needed a starting point. Even if it ended up being wrong, that would be more information than we had so far.

So Holly got up and stood by the whiteboard, and started writing down terms that we had encountered in our research, as well as some we had come up with on our own. Then we looked at the list and started to notice some similarities between them. So we began organizing them into sub-groups. Next thing we knew we had three major sub-groups, and were arranging them into a diagram. And then we were taking every social media platform we could think of and plotting them onto the diagram. Less than an hour later, we looked at it, and realized… this was our definition.

I don’t think you’ll ever see a group of four students so excited about a triangle.

After work we had a class meeting to touch base with our advisors, and afterwards our group met with them one-on-one to update them on the last few days. We spontaneously shared our new definition with them, and they were as excited about it as we were. I’m starting to feel good about our project. Passionate, even. Maybe still a bit (okay, a lot) confused about what the end product is supposed to be… but we’re getting there.