The past six weeks have been interesting. At first, my plan was to take a bunch of classes that were sort of related to my project, hoping that the answer to my essential question could be found in the pages and pages of complicated medical documents that I was forcing myself to read. So I sat down and made myself read document after document, spending way too much time on small insignificant details, and writing everything down. While this did help me meet my time requirement, I wasn’t really learning about adolescent psychology. While I was learning how to properly read articles (thanks Daniel), I wasn’t making the connections between the courses that needed to be made. It wasn’t until I started trying to figure out what the outcome of my project should be that I made a realization. Maybe it was the amount of coffee I had had, maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t taken my meds in days and finally decided to take them (something I do not recommend doing), whatever it was, I started seeing things more clearly. While I won’t explain everything that happened – it’s all in my last post – I will say the major points. What I realized is that my essential question should have been: Why do so many psychiatric disorders emerge/manifest in adolescence? While I know that it’s probably not a good idea to change my essential question now even though I want to, I’ll just make it a sub question. When I came to realization I started to choose articles that talked about my new question rather than following a syllabus with over fifty articles on it. I scoured the internet to find videos that might be able to explain this phenomenon, and I found a lot of good information. Instead of trying to learn as much as I could about a very broad question, I focused on something more specific where I can learn far more. While I understand that I won’t be able to definitively answer the new question, I’m not sure if anyone can, I am much more comfortable now than I was. I think the thing that has helped me the most is to constantly stand back and ask myself, why is this important, and do I need to know this to understand my project? By asking myself these questions I’ve been able to cut my workload in half, which has been amazing on my sleep schedule and my hands since I handwrite the majority of my notes. I hope that when I go off to college and hopefully continue researching this, I’ll remember those two questions.