For my Practicum, I would like to say that I was a little ambitious, but that has never hurt anyone right? That's why for the practicum, I wanted to do research under someone at the iSchool. I was especially interested in social media, and how that influenced my identity, and the identity of those like me. Based on information that I had heard from upperclassmen and relatives, doing research at a university requires that you work with or under a professor who is doing some similar work in their own labs. That's why I knew I had to find a supervisor at UMD's iSchool to help me with my practicum work, and so that I could learn more about the research process. Finding a supervisor for the practicum was a little daunting, because I had no idea if any researcher would even be willing to take an undergraduate, a freshman no less, into their lab. I decided to just clench my teeth and create a list of emails of professors and researchers whose work and published articles aligned with my practicum goals, and emailed them my resume, transcript, as well as my reasons for emailing them. I made sure that each email had a paragraph that referenced an old paper that they had published that related to my goals for the practicum. I didn't hear back from almost all of them, and I was a bit discouraged, until Dr. Ana Ndumu reached back to me. She wanted to meet on zoom to discuss if I would be a good fit for working with her. I was ecstatic, but nervous. Dr. Ndumu was actually the one who proposed that I should turn this into my own study, and not just simply join a project that she was working on. I was nervous, but I felt that I would learn a lot more from actually starting a research project from scratch, so we created a timeline of things that needed to be done, and I was assigned several tasks that I would be working on up until the Academic Showcase. Doing qualitative research requires attention to detail at every step of the process, especially when dealing with something so sensitive as individual stories and experiences. I first had to conduct an extensive literature review, just so that I could get a sense of what definitions were already out there that related to identity formation, online information behaviors, and the Black immigrant experience. I learned a lot, especially when it comes to the way that children of immigrants identify themselves, and how it depended on a number of factors, socio-economic class being a notable one. After doing the literature review, me and Dr. Ndumu had to decide what would be the best way to collect data. At first, we both thought card sorting would be a fun and easy way to collect information, but I felt that was a bit impersonal, and wanted to be able to get richer information from participants. That's when Dr. Ndumu suggested focus groups, in which there would be several sessions with a small group of participants, that would be based around a few questions that they would have to answer. Jumping forward to this past February, that seemed to be the best choice, as I learned a lot about the participants, and about myself, in relation to the research questions. After the focus group sessions concluded, we had to transcribe and code the data using DeDoose, which is a popular qualitative research software that allows you to assign certain "codes," or words, to phrases in the transcribed audio. It's been a lot of work, but I have learned a lot about science in this process. I learned a lot about science and research during this practicum experience. Particularly, I learned just how hard it is to actually conduct research, especially as an undergraduate. It was really hard to balance classes and my research work, and would spend most of my weekends fall semester doing literature reading and searching. I learned about the different definitions of identity that immigrants have set for themselves, and how there are many factors related to gender, socio-economic status, and age that contribute to how a child of immigrants identifies. Finally, I learned that there is much work to be done in academia to create a collection of articles and findings related to the experiences of immigrants and children of immigrants, as they are underrepresented in research, and there needs to be more people to listen to their stories and their experiences. Now that my time in Scholars is wrapping up, and Dr. Ndumu and I are preparing to start writing our findings for publication; I really do appreciate research, and how fun this experience really was. I want to continue to do research on immigrant experiences in America, and I hope to continue to contribute to the growing literature of papers related to it. I also am now more motivated than ever to go to grad school to join a program related to social analysis research and communication, and make a career out of it, whether it be working for a company or at a University.