Due to the pandemic, most students ask other older people for help. It is also the case for my sister who asked for help in an interview about my past research experience. It is fortunate that I had no prior arrangement to her asking that I was able to do it immediately. I wanted to share it with you guys just in case you know someone who might need some advice for how to deal with writing a research paper for the first time. Take note that this is not a detailed guide as I only wrote the main ideas that I wanted to impart, if you find yourself with more questions, feel free to leave a comment and I will answer to the best of my ability.

Below is the copy of the interview Q&A

1. What is the title of your research paper?

   • The title of our research paper is "Correlation between internet availability and academic performance of CMSHS Grade 12 students in Biology I for SY 2018-2019".

1. Are you doing it alone or by group?

   • We did this research in a group consisting of 4-5 members.

1. Why did you choose your topic?

   • We chose this topic because at the time, Biology I is one of the hardest subject we had due to the advanced lessons that our teacher gave us. As a Science High School, the teachers were given more leeway on teaching the advanced ideas of the topics assigned to the teachers. Internet availability played a part on who can do some advanced reading on the topic and who cannot do deep reviewing on the topics and only rely on the reviewers given by their classmates.

2. What is your advice for me as a future researcher in terms of :

   4.1. choosing a topic

   • In terms of choosing a topic, you must find a problem in your immediate area that you know a research can hypothetically solve. It is said that one of the qualities of a great researcher is the ability to see problems everywhere. So, you must choose a problem and use the research to either find the root cause of the problem and the factors that affected the growth of the problem or provide a more thorough investigation which will lead to an answer to the problem presented.

   4.2. writing each part of the research

   • In writing each part of the research, one must be very clear on the scope and limitation of their study. This will help minimize the stress of trying to take on a big project with very limited time. Also, it is important to keep track of the references used for each statement written in every part, this is to give due credit and to ensure the reliability of the research methods. For the related literature part, this seems to be a big hurdle for most but I found that this one is easily done when you clearly know what the scope and limitation of your research is and what the purpose of your research is. Once it is evident, then it is easy to ignore the distracting parts of the related researches and focus more on the topics that really aligned with what we want to do.

   4.3. time management

   • For time management, the best advice I could give is to start as early as possible and do research work everyday, no matter how small it is. Don't try to do the research paper in one day.

3. What are the things you wish you have learned when you were in Grade 10 about research writing?

   • The thing that I wished during Grade 10 research writing is that we can keep a matrix of the RRLs that we will be using so that we never lose track of it. The matrix usually includes the title, author/s, published date, journal name, peer review/rating, summary of the RRL, how it relates to our study, and the DOI or anything that will easily help us find the research. I also wished they taught us to back up our files and document everything. Maybe it would be common sense once we get the hang of researching but as someone who were trying out research for the first time those little things usually led to more stress on our part because we were more focused on the “more complex” things.

4. Describe your experience in research writing. (Let the interviewee tell his/her story. Then just get the main points. Use bullet form)

   • My experience in research can be broken down into three parts: the preparation phase, the research phase, and the defense phase.

     • Preparation phase includes sharing research titles with our research adviser and waiting for her go signal. Most of our earlier research title proposals were rejected due to the vague limitation of the studies or unquantifiable data that we want to gather. We looked for some related literature to check the feasibility of the study and when we got the go signal, we went ahead to the research phase.

     • Research phase is where we begin our research; this is where we started gathering related literature for references, some guidelines to methodology, and an idea on how to interpret our data. After that, we begin distributing survey forms to the respondents, organizing the data, and analyzing them.

     • Defense phase is when we had to defend our study. This is the time when we faced our research adviser with some panelist so that we can explain our topic and defend the research where we have to back up our claims with the RRL we used. I found that this is the easiest part when the research is done properly with no use of cheating methods like manipulation of data, etc.

This interview gave me such nostalgic feelings and I know that I will be doing my best to impart my knowledge to my sister. I missed the times when we were out late at night, trying to finish our research papers along with dozens of assignments while trying to review for 5 quizzes tomorrow. Wherever you are past self, I salute you. I do not know where that energy came from. Now that I am in college, I struggle keeping awake when it is past 9:00 pm but back then I was functioning on at most 3 hours sleep time.

Hopefully, this can also reach people who may need some advice for starting their research paper.