I am a student of first-year MBBS, fairly recently enrolled on the online research classes conducted by the FHTS team. Writing a paper has become synonymous with being a college student, thanks to the media. In every American teenage show, the students are shown scrambling with the research projects that they are working on for college admissions. Being an Indian student, writing a research paper was just considered something fancy, something that would make you look like the students in a television series. I was one of the many people who developed a curiosity for writing papers because of this reason. As a result, I did a lot of research on writing research papers; I asked people around me, people looking to get admissions to colleges outside of India and speakers who visited our school to talk about colleges abroad. But to my displeasure, I could never quite understand the purpose of writing a research paper. I could never understand what we are accomplishing by, what seemed to me to be, a simple collection of already available information and then presenting it again in a different format. I thought writing research papers was all about making unique groundbreaking inventions and theories and being pioneers in publishing newfound information. With that said, I had concluded that writing research papers is something I could do only after graduating or never even do at all.
This primitive mindset soon came to evolve when I was introduced to research paper writing by my college. With each research class I attended, I realized just how broad the scope of research is. I realized that writing research papers is not about collecting and presenting existing information, it is about studying it. It is about comparing it with our lives and the many social, economic, geographical, educational and cultural factors, to name a few, that influence it. I have come to learn that doing research is not just something needed to get admission to colleges abroad, instead, it is a very scholarly approach to enhancing our education and learning about the real-world dynamics revolving around the information available to us. Research is actually, synonymous with studying and doesn’t require one to be a professional to adopt it as a method of learning. More than anything else, I know that there is so much that is yet to be explored in the world of research and I am exceedingly curious about what our classes have in store for us.