By: Luara El-Dine and Dana Goldy

As the year comes to an end, for many students in honors sophomore English that means one terrifying thing: I-Search. Although I-Search means hours of research and writing, is it all that bad?

I-Search is scary; 10 pages of research on one topic is something a lot of students don’t think they’re capable of doing. Luckily, the teachers here at Westborough High School have broken it down into pieces we can manage and have taught us how to manage our time well.

Throughout the year, I-Search is one of the things we think we’ve taken the most away from. It teaches students how to properly research; whether it be how to cite sources, or paraphrasing, we are taught skills that are crucial to know as we move on to our junior year.

Many students fall into trouble with time management. The I-Search can become an impossible task to complete the night before it’s due, which is why we come to resent it so much. As honors students, we are expected to work efficiently and manage our time well and we’ve had a whole year to adapt to these expectations so the I-Search shouldn’t be treated any differently.

We constantly hear our peers complaining about how awful the I-Search paper is but what the real issue is for them is their lack of time management skills. Rather than seeing how much we are benefiting from this research paper, some chose to complain throughout the entire process.

I-Search also teaches student how to properly research in an unconventional way. Don’t get us wrong, the last thing we want to do during our last week of sophomore year is write a ten page paper, but sometimes students have to suck it up to learn from the process.

Writing research papers is a process that we will have to go through many times in our lives, so we might as well get used to it now. As students, we will be expected to be able to research efficiently, put our thoughts and ideas together cohesively, and differentiate between credible and unreliable sources. The I-Search paper not only forces students to improve those skills; it also allows flexibility for each individual student.

Rather than writing a paper on the Civil War or a standardized lab report, we are able to pick topics that we find interesting enough to devote ten pages. That was a nice change from the required essays that almost never relate to the lives of students. Whether your topic is, bananas, dog, bigfoot, or antibiotics, each student is on the same playing field. We wrote about psychopaths and dog psychology, and were able to find plenty of information regarding our topics.

It also adds a creative element that is lacking from most of the essays assigned this year. Writing a paper in the first person allows for individuality and clear opinions in classes where interpretations are often right or wrong. Each student is able to develop his/her own voice; a nice change from the monotonous essays about tone or theme that never quite sound the way you want them to.

Overall, the I-Search is time consuming and at times overwhelming, but the benefits outweigh the costs in the end. It allows for individuality and improves our researching and writing skills. This infamous paper isn’t nearly as bad as we expected it to be, and we learned a lot through the challenging, yet interesting, process.