Evaluation of Project                                 Joshua Goraya

When I began my level 2 EPQ my I knew from the offset that I wanted to cover a scientific theme that covered my love of cycling, after much deliberation I decided on the tile “Doping in Cycling”. However, after talking with my mentor and the EPQ coordinator I came to the decision that the topic I was thinking of covering was simply too broad, I response to this I decided to narrow my topic down to something of more chemistry based title, “How can Doping Affect Performance of a Cyclist?”.  I felt that this was the perfect title for me and a subject that I could really get my teeth into and enjoy, whilst also developing my understanding on the subject.

Most of my time was spent researching on different subtopics that all related to the question I was attempting to answer, however I found that I would research for hours on end but not always focus my research towards the question, to combat this I decided to try and make my notes more concise and to the point, trying to include statistics that related to the question and to the question only. I believe that I found it difficult due to my passion in the subject getting too immersed in information that could be irrelevant. I think that I have had to develop my selecting and refining skills to make sure that I make good use of my time and for the improvement of the essay. I also struggled with the 4000-word count limit and discovered that it as indeed a skill to be able to be able to write to a certain number of words, though I do think that having the limit has enable me to create a more interesting concise final project for my reader as there is a large amount of information that you can learn from in a relatively short essay.

I found working with my mentor very useful as she was able to give me feedback on every aspect of my work from the quality and quantity of the research to the complexity of the writing as for someone who is not an expert in the field I explored it must be both understand but also fascinating to read, which is a fine balance. I tried to share my work with as many people as possible, as well as my mentor: My parents, my EPQ coordinator, the head of Science, receiving valuable help from them all. This meant that I could see how different people viewed my work and how they thought it could be improved.

I do endeavour to believe that I have produce an interesting thoughtful project, I think this is down to the volume of research and number of recourses I used during the process, allowing me to produce a strong condensed piece of work. This is something that I struggled with for the Level 1 project as my mentor told me that my work was to “Wordy” and needed to have more scientific terminology, I think that I know have the skillset to allow me to do this.

I have documented my journey throughout the EPQ project using my blog, which highlights how I have followed my timeline and some of the other issues I faced. One of which being the struggles had with referencing. After communicating with my mentor, I found that I needed to follow the Harvard referencing structure, she then gave me a table on how to do this for different types of resources, I found this extremely helpful as I could improve my work (and make sure that I wasn’t plagiarising someone else’s work), without is being done for me meaning I had to do it myself; which became very rewarding.

If I were to do the EPQ again or complete the Level 3 project, I would make sure to create a table of my own in which I could lay out how to reference each source of my project, making it easier later when I needed to write up the drafts. I believe that this would allow me to use my time much more effectively.