Professor Mertha’s talk about the complex politics of the khmer revolution was intriguing and filled with many complexities. His bit about the frustrations with research made me think about the research experiences I had my freshman year.

I was involved in the OADI Research Scholars Program with a cohort of about 15 other students. One of the biggest problems we all had was finding a topic to research. There were a vast array of things I was interested in, and I found that I could spend hours searching about topics and still not find something where I felt I could expand in my own unique way. Then, I ended up talking to a professor about my interests and he told me about the Cornell Migrant Program. After talking about it with other people who knew more about it, I came to know of the tumultuous events that led to its creation during the late 1960s, an especially active time on Cornell’s campus.

After some research into old Cornell Daily Sun articles, I realized it was time to go into the archives. I found some free Saturday mornings, ordered some boxes from the annex, wiped the dust off of them and sat down and went through hundreds of letters, newspaper articles, photos, ledgers, and other documents. What I unveiled was a very complex story that was much more exciting that I anticipated. However, this did not happen fast. I spent hours upon hours going through materials that did not apply to my research question. This is one of the struggles of archival research. You can go through four boxes of material and never get the information you were looking for. Then, when you get to the eighth ten-pound box, you find something amazing. Looking back at my archival research, it was rewarding in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. I value the information I gathered about migrant  farmworkers in the Upstate New York area, and the events that led to the creation of various community outreach programs. Moreover, I learned about the complexity of linking the rhetoric of research to its execution in community outreach.