This project has been a lot to handle! It’s been a busy week already, and this paper on top of everything has been overwhelming. That being said, the final touches weren’t super difficult. Adding in photos and visual aids to my pages was rather easy. However, a video I chose to add for supplementary information, was from a site other than YouTube, and I could not figure out how to embed the video so it could play right there in my page. I posted the URL, however, so hopefully that is enough and doesn’t knock off any points for me.

Legos! I used to love legos. My family owns a small movie theatre on the Oregon Coast and I remember having a play room inside the theatre and playing with Legos all day long. I liked the basic legos; I was never into the crazy intricate legos that you build fancy ships and things with. I used to babysit in high school and these two boys were always building Star Wars figures with their Legos. It was fun to help, but also frustrating because the pieces are so small and everything is so exact. That’s why I stick with the basic block legos. I think I still have them at home somewhere, too!

This week I continued my research for my cultural research paper.

I went to the Oregon State Library on campus and met with a librarian there named Cheryl. She was very helpful in teaching me how to successfully search on the libraries databases and finding acceptable scholarly articles. I attended a class last year (my freshman year) on how do search for articles and do this same kind of thing. I found it confusing then and I still kind of do, however Cheryl was able to help me further figure out exactly what I was doing. I found out that you can link your google scholar straight to the OSU library so you can see if an article from a book is available at your specific library. I found this to be very helpful because it can be so frustrating when you find an article that is perfect, except you do not have permission to read it or you must find the book in a library to actually read it. This was a very helpful thing to learn and I had a successful experience overall!

I also tried the Answerland chat with a librarian to see what it was all about and I found it to be rather unsuccessful. After what seemed like a long while for it being a “24/7” website, I finally connected with a librarian, who didn’t provide much help at all. The responses were very delayed and I found myself just sitting there, waiting for a reply longer than I should have been waiting. I think this website it a good idea, but my experience wasn’t as successful as I expected. I would rather meet with a librarian in person who can answer my questions elaborately and who can teach me hands-on how to do specific tasks.

For my Cultural Research Project, I chose to learn more about Ruth Gonzalez. Gonzalez is a Hispanic woman whose field of interest is mathematics. She became the first woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics in 1986 from Rice University. Both of her parents were born in Mexico, but Gonzalez was born in the US. Neither of her parents were able to receive very good education, so they are very proud of their daughter’s accomplishments. I differ from this woman because I have a different lifestyle. Both my parents are white and were born in America so they have a higher advantage over the Gonzalez family, who were unable to attend school and therefore did not necessarily see the importance of education. Gonzalez’s amazing achievements were able to open up her parents’ eyes to the significance and beauty of education. The chance of being able to interview this woman seems pretty slim, but if I could find some more information on her and research her a little deeper, I just might be able to find something to be able to reach her.
I did not use any of the resources above. I had no luck finding women by searching using keywords I was interested in. Instead, I Googled what I was interested in finding which was a woman mathematician from a culture other than my own.

I am excited to begin this project and start learning about a really inspirational woman!