Wildly Beneficial : Research Paper Turned Into an Argument by Grace

Wildly Beneficial : Research Paper Turned Into an Argument by Grace - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

An academic challenge I’ve encountered was during a semester of AP Language and Composition when I was assigned a research paper. We were allowed to choose any topic of interest that was nuanced and complex. I was required to have a conceptual understanding of the topic with in-depth statistics, facts, and sources. After a long time of brainstorming, I landed on investigating the ethicality of zoos.
At first, I struggled with managing my time and ideas. The web base held an overwhelming amount of research on all aspects of zoos. There were sites on education, abuse, health, environmental impacts, and more. I found myself at a loss on what I wanted to look for. This quickly became an immensely difficult task to organize in my brain.
To overcome this block, I broke down the project into smaller, more manageable pieces. I set specific topics to each paragraph that connect to each other and my thesis. But this soon enough surfaced my next compilation. The information I started to find countered my original thesis. At the start of the project, I was fully against zoos. I believed that keeping wild animals in captivity was wrong and should be stopped. However, I learned that there are different types of zoos in terms of funding that reflects the care of the animals. Zoos surprisingly have many efforts to help the livelihood of the animals and environment.
This new information that I found required me to shift the angle I was writing my paper on. There were more sources on tragic stories of animals at zoos than there were on the positive aspects of them. This meant I had to dig deeper into the history and effects of zoos around the world. Many interviews were conducted for this project where I got mixed feelings about this topic. I interviewed teachers, zookeepers, and PETA with differing opinions. Many people automatically believe that keeping animals for entertainment purposes is wrong. But looking deeper, zoos work to save endangered species and educate the public.
This project took a preconceived notion that I had based on no information and turned it around. It tasked me with having to do a shift in my thinking and research to try and convince others about this positive place. An open ended research paper turned into a deep argumentative essay about how zoos are a wildly beneficial place for the world.