Written by Professor Rogue
I sometimes reflect on the qualitative and quantitative methodological course that I took during graduate school, as I entered the world of academic ghostwriting with Unemployed Professors, and feel like these methods courses were a waste of time. While I have worked on a lot of methodological projects and custom essays as an academic ghostwriter, most of my personal work is theoretical and analytical. I look back upon the hours of suffering and angst that were associated with my grad school era quantitative and qualitative methods classes and squirm. I never want to do another regression analysis if I don’t have to and hope to never again have to read high-fluting technical doctrine about how we should engage in qualitative analysis. This is not to say that I’m not happy that I can interpret regression results or evaluated whether a study is valid or not. It’s more related to a set of traumatic memories of the stress that my graduate school professors inflicted upon me during these courses. But I digress, I took these courses, did well in them, and write on these subjects today as I work on custom essays.
I have however recently discovered one area of my personal life in which my methodological training is paying off in spades. I am a genealogist and family historian. This means that I continue working on building my family tree and finding more about my ancestors. With them coming from at least nine different countries speaking at least seven different languages, saying that my family tree is a challenge is an understatement. It is also really depressing to look through old world death records and see ten children under age one die for each adult during a famine or cholera epidemic. That said, my methodological training has allowed me to optimally analyze the information that I gather while working on my family tree and has also significantly facilitated the process by which I can extrapolate from these records to contextualize them in relation to real world historical events occurring in these places during these time periods.
Ultimately, I do not regret having taken these methodology courses in graduate school. They were challenging, stressful and sometimes traumatic but paid off my allowing me to develop skills that most people do not hold. These are useful to me as an academic ghostwriter writing custom research papers and as a genealogist working on their family tree. The main lesson to be learned from these reflections however is how skills that we may learn when taking classes that we have no interest in might pay off in terms of helping us in other spheres of our lives much later on in our lives. I never thought that the skills that I would develop in studying methodology would help with my genealogy research, but they have been critical in terms of my archival research and my organization. The lesson learned from this is that, no matter how useless a class might seem to be, you never know when taking it will pay off later in your life.