In the Thick of It

It's been a few weeks since my last post, and the Capstone paper is in full swing.

This paper is tough. While I am generally good at research and finding sources (and genuinely enjoy it), I was pushed out of my comfort zone and utilized new-to-me search skills to find academic sources on Westlaw, SSRN, and the Tulane library site.

This was all well and good, and I felt confident in the variety and quantity of sources I found.

Then came the annotated bibliography. My own personal hell.

Writing Blue Book citations is tough. Really tough. They take hours upon hours, and even with all of the time I put in, I'm still not confident they are correct. Crossing my fingers that I made a personal breakthrough and was able to correctly list all 23 sources I will be using for my paper.

Despite the difficulty, there is definitely a sense of accomplishment with each portion of the project I finish, particularly one as substantial as the annotated bibliography.

Next is the outline. I'm not a huge outline user. I usually write out a very rough/vague outline, but nothing detailed. This will be another challenge for me, but I know having a more detailed outline will be beneficial in the grand scheme of the paper.

I am also starting on the introduction, which is always the hardest part of the paper for me. How can I succinctly summarize the entire landscape of the paper, without being too wordy or diving too deeply into the topic?

The idea of using footnotes is also daunting. I'm never actually written a paper with footnotes, so I even had to look up how to technically execute footnotes in Word.

I really am in the thick of it, and I'm just starting to see the light at the end of the proverbial Tulane tunnel.

In the Thick of It © 2023 by Amanda Story is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0