May 15 (Monday)

After deciding on my topic – affirmative action – I retrieved my old set of questions and read through them again. Referring to my affirmative action bibliography, I found the full print versions of all my references and began the arduous task of reading through them (some of those articles are really long). I printed out the shorter sources and made summaries of the longer ones. One of the sources has a really useful table, which I examined. Hopefully, I can make it into a graph of some sort later.

May 16 (Tuesday)

Today I continued reading my references. I finished two of them (Reverse discrimination works both ways and Ending affirmative action would devastate most minority college enrollment). I also created two histograms out of the table mentioned yesterday – one breaking down the views of different racial groups on affirmative action in principle, and the other breaking down the views on affirmative action in practice.

May 17 (Wednesday)

The PC lab wasn’t open today (the Geometry class was in there) and all the computers in the library were taken, so unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any new information. I did, however, finish reading all of my references.

May 18 (Thursday)

I got a computer in the library today, and started searching for information regarding race distributions in some of the “elite” colleges. I created pie graphs for the race distributions at Yale and Stanford. I also did Duke in hopes that I could find the information about North Carolina State and contrast the two colleges.

May 19 (Friday)

I started writing my main paper today. I searched North Carolina State’s website for information regarding its demographics…but was unable to find any statistics, unfortunately.

May 22 (Monday)

I finished writing my final report today! I don’t have too much else to say. I feel like I focused a little too much on one source, but that’s mainly because the source had extremely useful and interesting statistics coming from reputable researchers. I still feel like there’s a lot to say, and a lot of territory to cover…but I guess unless I was going to turn in a 20-page paper, I couldn’t even begin to go over all the topics. And you don’t want to be reading/grading all of that.