Learning New Skills: How to Plan/Contacting Experts

In a meeting today, we were given some more tips and information about effective planning and ways to contact experts as doing these efficiently will greatly increase our marks.

Planning

We were advised to complete our plan as soon as we could, mainly so we could get it checked with our supervisor before the summer.

A good plan has clear objectives with indication for success as well as being thorough, specific and detailed. As well as this, a plan needs to predict the activities, sources and problems we may complete/use/face as well as identifying solutions to any problems we face. Also, we can make notes about what we've learnt about each week from our planning for example we learnt to give less work if we are busy one week.

For my plan, I will set myself certain goals per week and set specific self-made deadlines to complete (objective) as well as a list of resources I will be using as well as problems/solutions. This way I will stay organised of what I need to do and by when so I can keep on top of my research.

Contacting Experts

As well as tips for our planning, we were told tips and given advice for the best ways to contact experts for our project. As contacting experts will give us good and trusted information as well as show our use of resources, we were advised to contact as many as possible, and to look on the internet, on university websites/open days, with friends and family and our teachers/supervisors who may specialise in our topic or know someone who does.

When contacting these experts, we were told to ALWAYS use the 4 (5) P's

Prepare in advance about what you want to know, so you aren't wasting time or finding the wrong expert.
Politeness. The more polite you are to the experts (using correct modes of address/grammar etc)
Precision, asking exact questions not asking for them to teach you a whole topic.
Persuasion and Patience, being persuasive in our email's or contact and also being patient when waiting for a reply is essential to get the answers you want, and using follow up emails in case they have forgot to reply.

As well as this, we were encourages to research the people before diving straight into the emails, and making notes about how the finding/interview went and recording/screenshotting their reply to put into our work.