I’m a finance major, so to me, the right way to research is very important. I am graduating this spring and looking back, I feel like I lost count of how many times I had to obtain and analyze data about different companies. I took this class to learn some new techniques to efficiently find information and I wish I took it earlier in my college career.

These past four years, I think I used databases for my finance projects maybe twice at most. I had no idea how to conduct a proper database search to get the exact set of results and such a wide range of databases on our library website intimidated me to the point where I settled down for just “googling” terms. For the very last presentation at Baruch in BPL, I used several databases to find marketing information as well as ratios and it actually took me a much smaller amount of time than searching through regular browsers. Not to mention that Yahoo Finance, for example, probably provides a less accurate and a less detailed set of information than Hoovers.

Besides learning how to use databases, I gained a new perspective on how technology affects our lives. Phones and cameras and social networking have become such a normal part of our lives that we no longer question our necessity for new gadgets. Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture was interesting because our personalities, our behavior and even our social circles are shaped by the way we use technology and how often we use it. The Filter Bubble was a very amusing book because I never previously questioned the results on my search engines, what I saw is what I got. The book made me want to conduct several searches every time I need to find something to gain a more diverse set of data and then definitely clear my cookies.