Hey Everyone!
Over the past week I've got my critiques for my methods proposal and began fixing it. For the most part, the big problem with my proposal was in the way I explained it, so now it's time to get down to business and begin my research!
My original plan for my research began with the collection of data for all of the companies in the social media industry that I planned to analyze for my comparable firm analysis. Although I have begun my data collection, I have not completely finished as much as I initially wanted to. This is primarily because I have been focusing on my methods assignment rather than my research this week. In the coming weeks, when I have far more time to work exclusively on my research, I don't envision the same problem arising again. Another unanticipated drawback that I have experienced in collecting data is the amount of tedious searching I have to do on NASDAQ's site. Historical data isn't listed directly in a table for companies, so I have to manually go through each company in the industry, and record their historical data at various IPO periods. Thus, I must sort through close to one thousand companies on NASDAQ's site. This may take longer than I initially anticipated, and I think two more weeks is an appropriate amount of time to set aside for the task. The good thing about the data collection, however, is that I only have find data points corresponding to five different time periods, rather than ten or twenty.
This puts my schedule about three to five days behind what I originally projected. However, I am not too worried about such drawbacks, because the data collection was already the most tedious part of my methods section, and I expected to spend a long time with it. For the most part, I have created my schedule so that I have "buffer room" each week in case an activity is more difficult than I envisioned it to be. The other part of my methods that will most likely be tedious is the selection of comparable firms for each of the five firms that I am analyzing. After this, I expect the methods implementation to be on par, if not easier than what I originally expected, as I have become more familiar with the implementation of the methods after reading and thinking about them more.
Finally, I initially planned me methods implementation to last until February 20th. This gives me a week of extra squeeze room in case something goes completely unexpected to plan. Otherwise, I'm feeling great about research, and I'm excited to be doing it! (449)
Signing Off,
Akash
Akash, I want you to consider, if you've already used your "buffer room" how you'll compensate for any other problems that you may encounter that'll slow down your methods. In other words, I'm concerned, if right at the beginning of your schedule, you've used any and all slack you carved out for yourself.
ReplyDeleteAkash,
ReplyDeleteI think it's good that you were able to work out potential kinks in the process early on. I also think it's great you gave yourself a buffer zone from the start. My question to you would be, since you already used a lot of your buffer how will you account for any further hiccups? I think you seem to be on a good path and are working out exactly how long the research will take. I am confident you will stay on schedule and yield great results
This is my comment! You stole it!
DeleteHey Akash!
ReplyDeleteIt's really exciting that you've already started implementing your methods! But it really sucks that you'll have to manually organize all the information your looking for from thousands of companies. Is there any way you could code something or use a program that puts values into matrices for you to make it easier? (idk I'm trying to think of math-y stuff but that's much more in your domain than in mine)
Weak-ish comment. You can do better!
Delete