Here in the Shipka Spaces, I had to ask myself if a Post Ph.D. and a self-proclaimed Survey Designer failed in hsi design of a survey, how was a lowly BS in Information Systems with a minimal background in Survey Design supposed to design a survey that would capture the data I was seeking, "What is the Student Culture at UMBC?" I'm over my head but it doesn't matter, the show must go on.

I find myself pouring over scraps of discontinuous pieces of data and fragments of hints of how to query this when it occurs to me that the survey I took recently about membership in UMBC organizations was a complete disaster because ti was skewing the data in exactly the direction the designer wanted to go. This was exactly what I did not want to do. I opted for an open-ended essay type survey providing the space for my peers to say whatever they wanted to say. This technique could have also been a failure because there was the possibility that no one would say the same thing and the answers would all be random with no correlation with each other. In other words, one underlying theme may not emerge resulting in a headache for me as the statistician. It was a calculated risk I thought was worth taking.