Sarah's

During this first week, i was not attending at school because of family reason. It leaded that i missed out the very first knowledge about this subject. However, before starting school, i have thought about the topic that i am going to focus on for my subject so it was not very hard to catch up with my mates. My topic was International students in Australia. I felt very curious and interested about this area as i am myself an international student. This was my first week at school and i had to work extremely hard to catch up with class work. Firstly, i joined my class wiki on www.wikispaces.com website. Although i decided my topic, i seemed not having any key ideas that i could focus on. So I asked Mrs Woud, my Research Project teacher to help me to figure out what i needed to do. Finally, i had some great ideas about my topic. I had more interests as soon as i have a plan what to do. During this week, my teacher asked us to start to write a proposal. I had received some information sheets that were handed out by teacher. They were very useful as they helped me to understand clearly what to write for each part of my proposal. I also had chance to watch a video which was made by Adelaide University about ethnic and safety which were two of the most important parts while doing research. In addition, i needed to sign in an agreement form to make sure that i understood clearly about ethnic and safety. As i found my interests about my topic, I had finished writing my proposal draft very early. To achieve a better grade, i asked my teacher to give me some feedbacks about my proposal. After fixing my proposal twice, I finally had my good final one. Then, it was time for me to start researching. Firstly, i decided to focus on questions which were listed in my proposal to search for secondary information about international students. I believed that this was the most important and difficult part as i would need to spend lots of time on reading, acknowledging and selecting the most trustful websites and information from hundreds in the internet. In the first lesson, my teacher handed out the plan sheet that we had to focus on during doing our research. According to the plan sheet, the main job in this week was working on survey questions and interview questions. As I missed out 3 lessons during this week, i decided to do extra work at home. Base on my knowledge about how to create a survey from doing research project Stage I last year, I could quickly start working on my survey questions on website [|www.surveymonkey.com]. To get to the very deep information about my topic, I planned to make 2 separate surveys. The first one is for international students in Australia. The questions in this survey are mostly focusing on their life, school and issues faced. The other one is for non-international students in Australia. The reason for me to create this second survey was that i wanted to know how local students think about international students in their area. During doing my survey, i faced a problem which was that the [|www.surveymonkey.com] website didn't allow standard user to make more than 10 questions each survey while I wanted to ask international students more questions to get the deep information. My teacher suggested me to visit some other websites to find out if they allowed more than 10 questions. I couldn't find any better websites than my old chosen one, so i planned to make 2 separate surveys for international students. The first one was going to focus on their basic information such as home country, school, and period time living in Australia. The second one would be about their life and issues faced while studying and studying here. Although I knew that it would be quite inconvenient for them to do 2 surveys, i hoped that they would be happy to help me out with this part. So finally, I produced 3 surveys, one for non-international students and the other two for international students. Before spreading them out for people to do, I carefully show them to my teacher so that she could help me to fix and make them better. Then, my job is to work on interview part. For my interview questions, my teacher helped me fixing my old draft and gave me some more idea questions. I then could have to redo it again to end up the final one. There was also a survey and interview consent form needed to be signed by me and so that I would be allowed to make an interview/ ask others to do my survey. Also during this week, i was asked to prepare notes for the first discussion between teacher and student one on one. What i need to discuss about was everything related to my research project so far. The discussion would be about 10 minutes long and be recorded. According to the guide sheet handed out by my teacher, i would need to acknowledge what had been going on and discussed about it to teacher. My works for this weekend were to relook at what I did and organise everything. There was a small change in my topic's name which was International student in Australia. After looking at my proposal, my teacher gave my same feeds back. Firstly, she suggested that it would be clearer if my topic's name is changed to “Challenges for International students in Australia". Secondly, she also comments about some other key ideas that i could use to get deeper information about my topic.
 * __Week 1, term 1 __**
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 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 4, term 1 __**
 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 5, term 1 __**


 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 6, term 1 __**

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">This week, I had been showed some folio examples which got grade A, B and C from SACE website. I had to read through them to have a standard knowledge about what I should do to achieve my final grade. I found that it was very useful as at least I understand what kind of things a folio folder contains. During this week, I was focusing on looking for secondary information that would be contained in my first discussion. I found it was very hard to collect enough information which is also trustful. It took me lots of time to read and understand because of the limit of my English skills. __** Week 7, term 1 **__ <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">During long weekend, after checking everything carefully, I uploaded my surveys into my Facebook page and asked for people to help me to complete it. The responds that I got so far were very interesting.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Also in this week, I made the first interview with Ms Anderson who is an International Students’ Manager. From this interview, I have got much useful information. I think it was time for me to do the first discussion in week 8.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">During this week, I started to make note for my discussion. My discussion note contains these following things: - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">How is the topic being defined? - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">The processes - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Safety and ethnical - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Guiding questions/ideas - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Chosen capabilities - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Things that I have done so far - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Challenges - <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Skills that I had before I began the research and what do I need to improve? <span style="color: #000000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">As the teacher was away for the last 2 lessons of the week, so I couldn't have chance to ask her for feedbacks or making appointment time for my discussion.
 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 8, term 1 __**

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">This week, I was asked to choose how I wanted to present for my outcome. After thinking carefully, I decided to do my outcome as a PowerPoint oral presentation. That means, besides writing transcript and I also needed to present all information and images that I have found on PowerPoint slides. My outcome would include: - <span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Introduction about international students (numbers, their hometown...) - <span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Reasons for them to choose studying in Australia - <span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Australian course available for them/ tuition fee for each course - <span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Benefit from international students - <span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">International students’ problems and issues - <span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Support and services that be provided for international students.
 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 10, term 1 __**

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">This week, I need to show my teacher my draft outcome. However, one of the things was that I wasn’t able to arrange the second interview with an international students’ host as she is a busy person. Luckily, my teacher understood my matter and gave me some extra time.
 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 1, term 2 __**

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">During this week, I also collected my survey responses to start doing the analysis. As I made three surveys at a time, it took me many days to finish my survey’s analysis. To present, I created pie charts for each questions’ responses by using Microsoft Excel. <span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">After many time trying to contact with Ms Ahrens, I could finally made an appointment time with her on Wednesday this week. I had gained many useful from that interview.
 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 2, term 2 __**

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">I realised that I was a bit behind with my teacher’s plan; I tried to work harder on analysing my interview. I spent much of my time this week to work on my outcome transcript.\

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">After finishing my draft transcript, I quickly as my teacher to check and give me feedback. I realised that my transcript was a bit long and I might not able to cover it all within 10 minutes, so I planned to cut it down after receiving back my draft.
 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 3, term 2 __**

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Now, it was time for me to put information and images on the PowerPoint. One of the problems that I faced during this week was that I totally forgot to make reference for my images/ graphs that had been used for my outcome. So I needed to search again where I got them from and do the reference.

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">10 pages Folio was the important thing that I needed to work on this week. As I have found many sources from internet, I then could only list the most useful sources in this Folio thing.
 * __<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">Week 4, term 2 __**

<span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.33px;">My teacher also showed us some Folio example of other students so that we could make sure what to do.