PROCESS PAPER
Our experience with building our Guam History Day project was a great journey. The first thing we started with was choosing the category we wanted to compete in. We were torn between two categories. We were torn between the website category and performance. After bickering back and forth for a while, we finally settled on entering the website category.
After choosing the category, we needed to settle on a topic. We went through several subjects before settling on a topic that related to medicine. At first, we couldn’t narrow down the topic of medicine to one certain topic. The first idea we had was doing our project on the US Naval Hospital, but we weren’t happy with that topic. The second idea we had was to focus on Surgeon Philip Leach, the surgeon who brought the US Naval Hospital to Guam. After going through more topic ideas, we still hadn’t settled on what our topic was. On our fieldtrip to the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC), we still hadn’t narrowed down on what our topic was going to be. After doing some research at MARC and at the Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) library at the University of Guam, we finally narrowed down the subject of medicine to a topic. We chose the impact of Western style medicine as our topic.
After choosing the topic for our website, we started on all the research that we needed for our topic. We started our general research at Guampedia.com. We got the majority of our information for our topic at this website. After acquiring some information at Guampedia, we expanded our research to the Micronesian Area Research Center. We used the information that we got from Guampedia as a stepping stone for the research that we did at MARC and RFK library. We spent about three or four weekends researching at the two libraries. After getting a good amount of information about our topic, we started separating the information that we got, we started constructing our website. After finishing the tedious task of separating the information into the different medicine eras, we were ready to construct our website.
The first thing we wanted to accomplish on our website was choosing the general look of the website. We went through different themes but couldn’t settle on one. We figured that we should just go back to the theme and look of the website later on. We started on the thesis statement. The thesis statement took some time because we had to hit our target straight on. After lots of trial and error, we completed our thesis statement. Next we started on the different eras of medicine on Guam. The different eras slowly started coming together. After putting all our information in, we started the editing process. It took some time correcting some of the grammatical errors, but we got through it. The last thing we needed to accomplish was a theme. We finally settled on our theme, and our project was done!