R-to-the-M-to-the-C

Before the next blogger takes over on Monday, I promised to tell you something about Thursdays lectures. This week was all about the change in consumer behaviour that appears to take place in recent years. Although most of the information was already discussed in the last two weeks, it was nice to hear some different examples as well as other lecturers' views on Imagineering and customer behaviour. The different views of the lecturers and some students resulted in a number of interesting discussions. The flow of information was a bit less than previous weeks, but there was enough work to be done, due to another major part of the programme: the Research Methodology Course (RMC).

Next Monday, we have to hand in the first assignment for the RMC course. This course is developed in order to get our research skills at an academic level within eight months and have us writing a proper research proposal for our theses. The emphasis is currently on searching for relevant and reliable academic articles. The first exercise was to state three possible research questions, and find an academic article for each one. The next step then was to judge the articles' reliability and usefulness. I happened to find the holy grail, in this case an article about a research model which perfectly sums up everything I'm planning to study for the Emmen Zoo. The other two articles were about the role of the internet for Zoos and a study on destination loyalty among tourists. It really got me inspired and I ended up with some great ideas for my research. Not having done anything for the RMC up till Friday, with interesting and inspiring articles like that I managed to finish the assignment on Friday afternoon. It feels like I'm off for a good start. Hopefully I won't find a lot of my fellow students on Monday struggling to finish the assignment on time.

I'll see you guys around.