Course Projects

I just finished reading the outline of each of the four major projects we'll be completing this semesters in English 109. Between the four Google Docs describing the projects, there's a lot of content. I'm still digesting it all, but I walked away with more questions than I expected:

• First, it's a bit nerve-wracking that the projects are so open-ended. No project description included any mention of a topic or general theme. The genre used to present the topic and the general type of investigation is explained, but the topic itself is completely up to us. Less structure requires more preparation, but hopefully the final outcomes will be more personalized and relevant to us because of it. I'm also not clear: do these projects get explained more thoroughly as we progress through the modules--or is this all the information we have?

Por, Andres. "Super Nervous" 1/21/2016 via Flickr. Create Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 License

• For the good news: the topics are diverse and interesting. We get to analyze debates, create our own argument, talk to working professionals in our field, and overall immerse ourselves in topics that interest us. With this in mind, the open-ended nature of the projects can be a major plus. I'll get to study what I care about--not what my professor coincidentally finds interesting to him.

• The projects themselves require a lot of preparation and research. To analyze a debate in full, you need to thoroughly understand the topic. To gather primary sources of evidence from your field, you need to schedule interviews with professors or graduate students well in advance of the due date. These projects require a lot of pre-planning, because they simply cannot be completed a few days before they're due.

• I last took an English writing course in 2008, so I certainly wouldn't consider myself adequately prepared from high school or college-level English courses. Any information I learned then has largely been forgotten. However, the basic skills of how to write informatively and how to properly manage my time have been embedded in everything I do for years. I've had a chance to do a multi-year research project and work on semester-long chemistry reports. This type of work always involves taking a major challenge and chipping away at it bit by bit. I expect these English assignments to be similar in that regard. 

Reflections:
After reading posts by Jianna and Nicki, I got a sense that they too felt a bit of apprehension at the prospect of cold-calling faculty or graduate students to set up one-on-one interviews. I think that will take us out of our comfort zones, which could be a good thing. Jianna, in particular, seemed to add a lot of personal backstory into her posts, which really helped me--as a reader--better understand the author. I hope to incorporate some of that strategy into my own future blog posts!