“You may write about any topic of your choosing.” To many students these words represent endless opportunities to dive into their sincere interests and a sense of relief to veer away from writing another paper about a topic related to their major. Yet, I have come resent these words; they cause a lot more stress than relief. I have always felt these words as pressure to write about something intentionally different from major; although, my major, Political Science, truly is what I love to write about. I like to think that what I lack in creativity, I make up for in consistency. In other words, whenever I get the option to write about whatever I want, I still always fall back into my safe space of writing about some topic related to my Political Science classes. 

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Whether out of my conscious love for politics, or my subconscious fear of trying something new, when given the opportunity to create three projects about a general topic of my choice for an English class, naturally, I chose to write about political engagement in the lives of college students. In order to derive information about how, and in what form, political engagement manifests in the lives of college students I decided to interview professors in the Political Science department of my university. After I gathered information about professors' perception of their students' political engagement, I decided to create a poll that would seek to gauge my classmates, and the larger student body, about what specific issue areas most drove their vote in the 2020 presidential election. I provided a list of what I thought to be the most common policy areas for students to choose from, and also gave an option for respondents to write in if their specific policy area was not on the list.

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Since beginning college, this was my first attempt at casting a political oriented poll in which I would be using my own data to create an analytical essay. I did not expect my results to be perfectly reliable, partially given the short timeline I was working with, and also given my inexperience and lack of resources. Even still, I was hoping that my results were at least viable enough to establish legitimate conclusions about the state of my peers and classmates' level of political engagement. Unfortunately, as I worked through the process of creating a carefully worded poll and distributed it to a "diverse audience", I quickly felt discouraged with the polls faults. As much as I tried to mask the major holes in the information I derived, I simply could not continue to form a thesis on the basis of such unreliable results.