At first I was nervous about having to peer-review work from my peers in this class. I was excited to read the ideas of my classmates because despite being on similar pathways and grouped together by the prerequisites of our degree, we all have very different ideas, backgrounds and motivations with respect to our academic work and beyond, and I feel that these differences are an important source of inspiration and perspective not only for use as students but as people. I think that it is very important to be open to the ideas, advice and critique of others, and I think that the online format of this class due to the COVID-1 pandemic provides an additional “blinding” to the process, which I think will result in less bias throughout this exercise and throughout the class. Even though we often work to be unbiased towards others, I think we all are susceptible to very subtle, implicit bias that comes from in person interactions, even if it’s simply how someone looks or expresses themselves. With that being said, I think I felt more comfortable sending my proposal off into the ether to be reviewed by my peers, and I felt more comfortable doing my own critiques. I loved reading the ideas presented by my peers, and I felt that in trying to review their work, I was quickly able to reflect on what I had written and how I might be able to edit my own proposal. In seeing the strengths in my peers writing, I thought of my own way to incorporate those methods – whether it be in word choice or the structure and flow of the writing – into my own writing. Similarly, when I felt that something didn’t work, that something could be interpreted in different ways or raised questions that were not answered later on in the proposal, I found parallels to weaknesses in my own proposal and was able to view them with a new perspective. It was inspiring to see that in a very simple review process of only two other papers, I was able to look at my work with a fresh pair of eyes, and see things that I had lost track of when I was in the process of writing my proposal. It was interesting to think of this experience with respect to the peer review process we discussed in class. Both Dr. Massoni and Dr. Mueller expressed the many ways that bias can impact a paper’s journey into or away from a potential journal and how prevalent that bias can be, regardless of the worth of the research or how it was presented. Admittedly, it saddened me as a student to know that information and research which could be very important for our growth as a species and how we interact with our environment could be limited or restricted by political and social normative within the science community. I wouldn’t say I was surprised but there was a naive part of me that hoped that the science community might be slightly immune to cultural and social prejudice or favoritism that has nothing to do with the quality of the content of work in question. Returning to the reflection at hand however, I think the most important lesson I took from this process is that there is an art to presenting potentially complicated information in a clear and concise way, and that research design and sample collection methods in particular can become complicated quickly, resulting in data that might not be as informative as you’d want it to be. For me personally, I know that finding that balance between providing information in a straightforward manner while not simplifying it to the extent that you lose important content will be my biggest challenge.
