1. How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected?

For my first two essential questions, what makes a successful profile and application of it, I am studying different methods that profilers use and their effectiveness. For my third question, what are the dangers of psychological profiling, I’m learning more about some of the negatives of profiling in general. I am also finding some negatives within the methods used. However, I think I might change my essential question to also encompass the positives and all the help profiling has provided. I think it may be a nice moment to compare and contrast the pros and cons, which may allow me to understand the topic even further.

1. Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?

One of my biggest challenges is staying focused when working, specifically when I read or do coursework. What has really worked for me so far are podcasts and videos because I feel more engaged. I think that going forward I might see if I can download audio versions of any readings I have so that I stay engaged. Another method that I’ve been using that is helpful is to set timers for a certain amount of time and tell myself to be focused until it’s over. Then, I reward myself with a short 1-5 minute break and continue to work.

1. Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how?  What do you want to know more about?

For my first two essential questions, I am learning more about the methods that profilers use and how the information they provide may be helpful. I think that once I study more cases that I’ll get to see how the different methods are applied or at least see how profilers apply their knowledge. I also think it’s going to be helpful when I study the cases that went wrong (the profile was inaccurate) and the Unabomber case so that I can compare the two. That way, I can see which methods might have been “successful” vs. “unsuccessful”, or even what component/methods of the profile led to that outcome. For my last question, I am going to learn more about the dangers of profiling when I study cases where the profile was inaccurate and an innocent person went to jail. Sometimes I’ll stumble across some negatives of profiling, like how some methods may not always be accurate, which is interesting. I think that I may change my third essential question as I said earlier. I think that will allow me to go beyond the basics and really understand the importance of profiling.