Conducting Research Online During Covid-19

Mohamed Beyruti, Verrazzano Class of 2022, completed majors in Accounting and Business Management, and minor in Business Finance

 

During my semester taking ACC 414, I experienced the comeback of the traditional world from the virtual world and it was insane to see how many students wanted to come back from isolation. I learned that different parts of my research (especially the video) need to be prepared and thorough for all students to understand the interview process for my research. Creating a step-by-step process made the process smoother, and when writing the results of the paper I learned what went right, what went wrong, and A LOT has changed.

Originally the research for my capstone was going to completely different. I wanted to work on how COVID-19 impacted people’s work-life balance, but then my professor took it a step further, and the goal was to understand how people/students were impacted by the virtual world with COVID-19.

Developing my research paper helped me strengthen my writing skills, taught me different methods of writing for a specific topic, and increased my research skills. The research on this paper was insane; the number of articles about COVID-19, work-life balance, working from home, there was just so much to talk about.

In the beginning I was adding to much information and not drawing the reader into my research, so that’s where my professor came in. Luckily, he slowed me down and helped me with bits and pieces of research to add for my essay. This helped me understand not to hone in on every single detail, and I learned that they were many different methods about making my research paper both intriguing and convincing to my audience. The main idea of my topic is something that is familiar, considering that almost everyone stayed home during COVID.

I did not want my paper to seem informative to the point where it would not keep the audience’s attention (hence the graphs), and although I didn’t use a lot of vocabulary, I attempted to keep my ideas relatable and easy to follow. When writing my research paper, I used both similarities and differences from the main topic, so my audience would understand the difference between the virtual and traditional workplace. The tone of my essay is also very generalized, so the audience reading it will be able to form their own opinion from my paper.

There were many stages writing this paper, from the professor being a guide, the staff keeping me on the right track, to making sure I followed the steps needed to complete the paper, and I learned so much from each stage. I’ve got to say that everyone pulled through till the end to help make this thesis my masterpiece.