Yevgeniy Prannik

5/1/2015
UWRT 1102
Professor Intawiwat
Reflecting on the Project
Doing this extended inquiry, my idea pretty much stayed the same. I knew, going into this
process, a good bit about my topic of research and how I should go about doing it. Businesses in
themselves are risky, they pose a huge amount of financial danger, as well as a huge amount of
potential success. This alone made me think that this was a good topic of research. One of my
subtopics to research however, the dynamics of starting a business, changed because this quality
changes from business to business. I rephrased it into, the effect that a business dynamic can
have on the economy because this, pretty much, stays the same from business to business. A
business with a good dynamic is going to have a positive impact on both the local and potentially
national economy, depending on the size of the business. Other than this part of my idea, the idea
itself remained the same. The essay itself was structured around the main points that I had
questions about, and this answered my questions as well as addressed most of the things
surrounding the question itself. For example, my first point about how one should go about
starting their own business, one might have the question of how you would go about
accomplishing some of these steps, and the US Small Business Administrations webpage not
only listed a step by step set of instructions, but also provided resources which allowed you to
easily complete these steps in an organized fashion.

My research for my topic was a combination of easy and difficult. The easy research
results were my first 2 subtopics, the steps of starting a business and the qualities business
owners have. These results were among the first page of a Google search and directly answered
the questions I had in my mind. These 2 places provided a lot of information because these
questions are commonly asked and actually have distinct answers. Successful leaders and
business owners do have a distinctive set of qualities about them that make them so, and there is
a proper chain of events that will lead you to have a properly started business. The 3rd subtopic
got a little hairier, because this article, though as easy as it was to find, answered my question,
but from a different approach than I was really looking for. DeMers is a well-known business
analyst and in his article, he was explaining how one can use a specific tool called Google
Analytics to analyze your audience. During this process, however, he kept spitting out snippets
of an answer that I was looking for, and eventually pieced together. The last 2 pieces of research
were difficult to find and were kind of a hassle to sift through. Lowreys paper on the analysis of
the Kauffman Firm Survey went into so much depth on the subject of interest, I had to narrow
down what I was looking for to find a somewhat broad, yet specific enough answer to my
question. Ries book was more or less of an informational and instructional book on his method
of starting a business. In his introduction however, he answered the question of why businesses
fail with his opinion based on his own experiences. Both of those sources didnt provide much
information that I could use, but luckily for me, I wasnt looking for a lot of information.
The thing that most surprised me in my research were some of the qualities that business
owners can adopt to make themselves more successful. After reading through the article by
Travis Bradbury, it makes sense why these things would be beneficial, but you never really
would think of a business being benefitted by an individuals sense of purpose in life, for

example. That being said, I believe that the information that I have found was about what I
expected to find. I didnt expect that a business dynamic was effected by so many things on a
myriad of levels within the company, or that the suggestions for how business owners should fix
that could be so varied. This was the only thing that made me have to narrow my search a bit.
I have done an extended inquiry before, in UWRT 1101 as a matter of fact, so I knew
how to present just such an essay, but this one did have its own challenges. I am good at writing
formally as opposed to informally. Long, complex Ph.D. level essays are my forte, so this
freedom of having an aspect of informality in our paper, even an optional one, kind of threw me
for a loop. That being said, I took that as a bit of a challenge and wrote my introduction and
conclusion with a bit of an informal vibe, while my 5 body paragraphs remained analytical and
formal. I chose this way because I wanted to connect with my reader a little more than I have in
the past.
My experience with critique groups in my past has been rather bleak by comparison to
what I have experienced in the college environment. In high school, I was usually a better writer
than most of the people in my group, and my grade reflected that. A lot of times, I would get
advice from my group members that I knew was wrong, and therefore would make my paper
worse, so I tended to leave my opinions in the place of others. My group for this semester, the
Gryffindors, were a different story. Though at one point I came unprepared for a peer review
session, they still gave me constructive advice that improved my paper and allowed me to fix a
few errors. I do not have any questions to address them with, but only my gratitude.
From a research perspective, this project hasnt really been too different from past
research projects. As previously mentioned, the research tactics that I employed earlier on in my
life have pretty much stuck to this one as well. The only difference really, is the type of content

that I have had to research. Mostly all of my projects beforehand have been to research
something purely factual and objective. No opinions, just facts from which we could later form
our own opinions. Some of my subtopics for this project, however, have been purely opinion,
such as why businesses fail, or what makes a leader great.
I learned much during this assignment. A lot about the process of starting a business, a lot
about what it takes to maintain a business, and a lot about the behind-the-scenes of being a
business owner. I never thought about a lot of what goes in to the mindset of being a business
owner, and just how important that mindset is to the survival of the company. Also, I learned that
new businesses are what drive the American economy, and the success of every potential
business is only going to help the nation.