Research papers usually consist of five parts: intro, literature review, methodology, results, and conclusion. This means I was able to get all the way through my methodology, halfway through my paper, before I realized I was missing an integral part of my project. I had based my entire sophomore research proposal around a dataset that was not public.

Every year the GCISD Aspire program puts together the ASPIRE Creative Arts & Research Symposium. As part of the symposium, 9th and 10th grade students taking ASPIRE English classes have the opportunity to conduct original research and present it to the community. For the 2022 symposium, I researched how COVID-19 affected the performance of local high school choirs. I had planned on collecting data for school choirs in my area from University Interscholastic League (UIL), a Texas interschool organization that runs athletic and musical competitions, and comparing how the choirs scored in competitions prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. What I didn’t realize was that UIL did not release competition performance scores for 2020 or 2021, meaning the data set I had thought existed, didn’t.

When I realized this, I panicked. I began looking at similar data sets I could use, but I still had no luck. It was not until I got advice from my research advisor (and an extension) that I decided to modify my research question from, “How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect the performance of high school choirs,” to, “How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect performance opportunities of high school choirs.” Now, instead of looking up choirs’ UIL ratings, I found choirs’ concert schedules. I googled each choir, found their website, scrolled through their calendar, and counted how many concerts they had each year. Despite this long process, I still managed to finish a professional research paper with an original data set that I felt represented some of my best writing and research. However, this was not the end of the project.

The next aspect of the 2022 ASPIRE Creative Arts & Research Symposium involved a public presentation of our research. Every participating student was required to prepare talking points and a visual aid for our gallery style public presentations. This aspect of the assignment added another level of stress considering my project had gone wrong. However, after presenting in front of 200-300 people, I gained confidence in both my public speaking and research skills that I could not have earned without dedicating myself to a topic I cared about, finding a way past the obstacles, and reaping the end result.