Iran Nuclear Deal: Reflection

Over the semester my group covered the Iran nuclear deal and the role it played in the United States election as well as the reactions it garnered from the Middle East. In our first blog post we discussed the details of the Iran nuclear deal, the history behind it and leading up to it, and why it is significant. In our next post we presented Donald Trump’s view alongside Hillary Clinton’s view and compared and contrasted the two. In our third and final post we proposed potential scenarios that may arise as a result of the deal in Lebanon, the Iran deal from Israel’s perspective, and lastly how Saudi Arabia feels about the deal. Overall, throughout the semester we provided readers with some of the basic information needed to begin to understand the Iran nuclear deal both from our Country’s point of view as well as internationally.

To research our topic we first would think about the ways we could approach our topic and what would be interesting to research as well as discuss in our post. For each topic we would pick specific aspects to focus on and divide them up between the members of the group. We would each then conduct research on our own as well as adding any sources we thought others would find helpful to our googledoc for that post. Individually I would read multiple articles on my assigned topic to verify the information and tried to use sources directly from organizations pertaining to my topic, for example Hillary Clinton’s website, as well as .orgs and .edus. Working as a group influenced my approach because once we split up the work I was able to research more in depth and get specific rather than needing a lot of little bits of information for a more broad topic.

Going into this project I had a general understanding of the JCPOA but did not know many details or its background. Now after completing it I have a better understanding of why it was implemented, its immediate and long term effects, and how countries are and have reacted to it on a more global scale. With the Iran deal being a relevant topic and something that came up on several occasions in the recent election I feel that the knowledge I gained from this blog has been and will continue to be useful to me. I also learned that working a group comes with its pros and cons. For me personally I found that it was hard to take all of our different writing styles and make the post flow and feel cohesive. However, each member of our group brought something different to the table and it was interesting to see people’s different perspectives and opinions being brought together to form one post. In conclusion, I learned a lot and while it wasn't always the easiest project to work on I always felt accomplished at the end of publishing a post with my group members.