Both the end and the beginning...

14 weeks is both an eternity and a heartbeat.  A lot can happen in this time frame and a lot has happened.  The semester started in January when we were buried in snow but excited for a clean slate and a new beginning.  However, the semester soon lost its novelty as we trudge through the snow day after day, devoting myself to school and running.  I yearned for spring break and a welcome reprieve from the daily bombardment of information.  After spring break I returned ready for outdoor track and the home stretch of the semester.  However, I yet again forgot how fast the year goes after spring break.  It is now April 14^th and I am looking at my dwindling academic calendar than is crammed with finals, papers, and presentations. 

            How do I identify myself 14 weeks after that first blog post?  I am the same person but with more experiences, knowledge, and a slightly different perspective.  I have been challenged beyond what I thought was possible this semester and had several weeks in which I was waiting for everything to fall to pieces around me.  It has been a great growing semester through classes, research, and running.  I have (almost) conquered orgo II and the corresponding eternal lab, carried out a research project that I was sure would fall through, scored at the Big Ten meet, run a 10k on the track, and revolutionized my paradigm of how writing does and should function in college.  I now can legitimately identify myself as a researcher, a valued member of the track team, and a big picture thinker.

            As a writer, I have developed more confidence and a new perspective on where I ultimately belong as a writer in my career.  As I discussed in my last post, I hope to use writing as a constant challenge and a link between academia and the public.  Although I briefly considered this concept previously, I have put a lot of thought into the communication gap in the last 14 weeks.  I believe that I will always read and write scientific writing differently as I consider the intended audience and implications of the article.  I hope that I won’t forget the ideas that I have explored in this course and revert back to my hopes of being a introverted lab rat.  I think there is much more potential for me to occupy in the mysterious chasm that currently exists between academia and “real life.”

So 14 weeks later, the same person yet not.  I would say this is the end of  an intriguing journey for closure on the semester, but ultimately it is not even close.  The end of one journey is nothing but the beginning of the next. So here’s to the beginning of a new intriguing journey.

Where to go from here?

It is at this point in our lives that our future is possibly the most uncertain.  Although life is never predictable, we often have an idea of where we are heading and how we will get there.  However, as undergraduate students, we are at the crossroads of our lives.  Where we go after college will inevitably influence our careers and our lives.  Some of us know where we want to go and what we want to do whether it be medicine, law, engineering, or business. However, many of us don’t know where we will be a year out of graduation.  This is a scary yet exhilarating concept. 

Right now my plan is go to medical school or some type of graduate program for physiology or neuroscience.  I really want to enter either the medical field or academia. Coming into college, I was set on going into research.  I couldn’t see myself as a doctor and loved the idea of being a lab rat and publishing articles.  However, after my experiences so far in college, I’m not sure that that is where I want to be.  I enjoy writing and consider myself a strong writer but I don’t like the system of churning out articles for pension and teaching on the side. The writing skills that I would rely on would be dominated by technical and scientific writing.  Academia is almost a world of its own with a definite disconnect from reality that I have explored all semester.

My plans have recently evolved and as much as I am still intrigued by research, I want another dimension to my work.  I would like to become a doctor and balance clinical work with research.  I am intrigued by translational research and making research accessible to a broader audience through writing. This would require a different approach to writing. Instead of writing for a strictly scientific community, I would be reaching out to a community beyond academia.  This would be a much different challenge and require me to understand what I am trying to explain on a fundamental level in order to translate clearly. I think this is a challenge that  I am willing to take up and it would be very rewarding. 

Ultimately, I hope to find a career that I never stop learning or being challenged.  This is just my personality and I can’t really imagine being happy if I am not working hard and always being stimulated.  I think that responding to new genres and writing tasks will just be part of the challenge of constantly adapting and learning. 

Another post from the West Coast

 “Fame, fortune, wealth, glamour, and excitement.  The “City of Angels,” the land of the beautiful people, the leader in fashion, culture, and entertainment.  Welcome to Los Angeles, California, one of the biggest and most celebrated cities in the United States.”

Stanford one week, UCLA two weeks later.  I have to thank the football team for our extensive travel schedule because women’s track and field definitely doesn’t bring in a lot of money.  I am currently in a hotel room four miles from UCLA and a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard.  Track trips like these seem almost surreal as we are swept away from our normal lives in Ann Arbor and suddenly find ourselves across the country, guests at these famed campuses.  

            I have been to Los Angeles twice before and it was nothing like I had expected.  Los Angeles and Hollywood is portrayed by the media by a magical town of celebrities and fame.  However, I find LA to be somewhat ridiculous and sad.  Sunset Boulevard is lined with huge mansions that are all surrounded by huge fences and coded gates.  Hollywood is a short strip of tourism bookended by a pretty shady neighborhood.  It is a world of extremes with the richest and the poorest people living in such close proximity of each other.  The media ultimately persuades us that Los Angeles is a perfect city of wealth and fame.  However, I feel that it is a city where celebrities lock themselves in their mansions to avoid the crazy tourists creeping on their houses and a city where the socioeconomic extremes are repulsive.

             This fits with our recent discussion of persuasion.  How do we have such an established perception of Los Angeles even if we haven’t been there?  The media has a huge persuasive influence on people’s perceptions through television, movies, and magazines.  Television and movies are powerful because they draw so heavily on the audience’s feelings, beliefs, desires, and interests.  Therefore, many types of popular media rely on pathos rather than logos.  Many fads and celebrities are not necessarily rational, but they are immensely popular because of the way they make people feel.   This is an ultimate reflection of the power of pathos. 

            I attempted to discuss this phenomenon of a culture shaped by the powerful effects of the media through my experience at Los Angeles in my first paper of freshman year.  The opening paragraph of this post is taken from the introduction of this paper.  My teacher destroyed my paper and my confidence in my writing ability.   However, I recently looked back on that paper and realized where she was coming from.  I was trying to discuss a topic that I wasn’t exactly sure where I stood on and my argument was had undeniable holes.  The narrative sections were descriptive but definitely high school writing.  Even after this paper, I believed that my teacher didn’t appreciate my style. However, now that I have a great deal more experience in college writing, I realize that she was right and my writing and understanding of argument have come a long way since then.   I found it fitting that one of my last blog posts should revisit this experience as a reflection of my progress in two years of college.

            However, I think that part of my struggle with that paper was how difficult this phenomenon is to discuss.  Even now, on my third trip to LA and with much more writing experience, I cannot capture the phenomenon that I experience when I come here.  I know what I want to say but have a hard time describing it, possibly because I am addressing an audience that is corrupted by the very idea I am trying to analyze. 

Perhaps this is an idea that is better considered on my own.   Or maybe this trip I should try to visit LA with an open mind and rethink my ideas.   However, the countless “Star Map” sales are difficult to ignore.  

Either way, the elitist Stanford wins hands down in my preference of west-coast schools.

Going back in time

            I have enjoyed perusing my early blog posts and having flashbacks to January when everything was so new and I was so worried about how this course and this semester would play out.  As I look back, I am pretty impressed with the quality of my first blogs.  They were definitely written with an informal tone and included quality thoughts on the topics we were reading about and discussing in class.  However, I feel like I tried to hard to make them too informal at first and my tone became more professional and sophisticated as the semester progressed. This is even apparent my blog titles- “Mature Reasoning is going extinct!” to "More complex than it seeems" and "A surreal world of perfection."  I think the biggest difference was the depth of my ideas and application to what I was interested in and curious about.  At first I would discuss the readings and my thoughts on them, but I eventually began to include ties to my research, other classes, and my own ideas. I found blogs to be much more enjoyable when I took up the challenge of finding my own angle to the blog prompt instead of passively regurgitating what we discussed in class.

I am proud of how my blogs progressed the idea of bridging the gap between academia and the general public.  I would consider this the major theme of my work this semester and it has made me more aware of this phenomenon and what should be done about it.  My blogs also evolved in respect to the audience I was addressing.   At first I tried very hard to maintain a blog that was not obviously written for a class.  I wanted it to be a credible and thoughtful blog instead of being an obvious online assignment that may turn readers off.  However, the specificity of the prompts made this very difficult and I eventually conceded and had to reveal my identity as an English student.  I still tried to keep it focused on my interests and ideas but it definitely developed overtones of academic writing. 

Finally, the way that I wrote my blogs evolved over the semester.  In the beginning, I would spend quite a bit of time writing and revising my blog posts.  However, through the semester, my blogs became more of an organized journal on a topic rather than a polished piece.  I know that this is the idea behind blogs, but at first it was difficult for me to publish posts that I didn’t feel like were up to my standards.  However, I believe my better ideas were in posts that I would do more writing and thinking than planning and revising such as my brainstorm about using blogs as a teaching and communication tool at the University.   

Ultimately, I would not change the way I set up my blog or my early blog posts.  I think the way my blog posts evolved is interesting and this progression is more important than having sophisticated blog posts from the beginning.  Overall, I think it was a valuable experience and introduction to a unique media form that I will use in the future.

An epiphany of another kind

I have recently come to several realizations, most of which are quite startling.  First of all, we only have twelve days of class left, three of which I will likely be traveling across the country to run.  In that time span I have a ridiculously long and frightening list of things I have to do. One of them is figure out my classes for next semester.  Until now I have pretty much known what I was going to take and scheduling was just a matter of fitting things together.  However, next year I have to take biochem, p-chem, and physics and the rest is a bit up in the air.  I think what I have been thinking about the most is how I am going to fill out my social science and humanities credits.  These are especially intriguing because I have not had a lot of time to explore other areas besides my major.  

There are so many choices, so many things that I want to learn and pursue but there is simply not enough time.  I would love to be fluent in a variety of discourses- not necessarily languages but I want to understand communities and spheres within the University.  I wish that time and homework were not limiting factors in the four valuable years we have here.  I am intrigued by science classes but sometimes I feel like they are just throwing information at you that could just as easily be learned independently.  I want to find classes that challenge me in more ways than memorization.  However, this is extremely difficult to accomplish by just looking at a course catalog.  The more I have thought about this university wide blog system, the more excited I get about it.  Several times when I have been class searching, I wished that I had a type of reference like that to really see into professors and classes.  However, this is not yet a reality so I am restricted to word of mouth and course descriptions.  But I will eventually decide and then inevitably change my mind the first week or two into the semester.  Because that seems to be how I operate.

Another possibly scary realization is that my time here is nearly halfway gone.  I can't believe how fast the last two years went.  When I am looking at my requirements for my major, I am shocked at how many grades fill my transcript.  In some ways, my time here has been all that I have imagined and more.  However, I am always searching for that extra dimension to my academic experience.  A dimension beyond sitting in a packed Chem 1800 furiously scribbling notes of aldols and hemiacetals.  A dimension beyond shallow group discussions that nobody really wants to have.  I am still looking, and I am hoping that the best is yet to come and my searching will yield discovery.

This is somewhat irrelevant and a bit of a tangent but I feel that it belongs in this blog if it belongs anywhere.  First of all, I love being a member of the University of Michigan cross country and track teams.  There is nothing quite like wearing the block M across the country and still hearing cheers of "Go Blue!"  Being a part of the team has enhanced my college experience but sometimes I feel like it sacrifices some of my academic potential.   I am constrained by practice time and traveling and a conservative course-load is somewhat necessary to retain sanity.  I know I could take more classes and spend more time learning if I didn't run.  Sometimes I think about this and it bothers me slightly, but I realize that being a part of this kind of team is a very unique opportunity.  It has allowed me to understand a discourse of a very different type, although not necessarily academic, it is valuable nevertheless.  Ultimately, maybe classes and homework are not the only way to understand discourses and other communities.  I think the most important part is to look for opportunities everywhere- in classes, dorms, teams, clubs- to expand your perspective and learn something.  As for my classes, I am going to look for something that challenges me to expand my current range of classes.  This is a scary concept but exciting as well.  And as for my time being almost halfway done, I am going to try to think of it as more than half left.  Still time to find what I am looking for and more.  And of course, run fast in the process.

Go Blue!

Eureka moment!

I've been passively thinking about this persuasion presentation and wondering how I am going to be persuasive on an argument that I'm not sure is quite developed yet.  Needless to say, I have been stuck.  However, tonight I was hit with an inspiration and right now I am disappointed that I didn't come up with this earlier because my last paper would have been a lot easier and a lot better.  But what is past is past and there is no use dwelling on it.  So here we go.

The students at the University of Michigan are known as the leaders and the best.  Our school boasts top ranking programs and is one of the best universities in the country.

However, if you stood at the back of any given lecture hall, you would observe an interesting trend. NOt only would you see students typing notes but you would also see a great deal of the familiar blue border of the Facebook home page. 

 Facebook is ridiculously appealing and contagious. You can see what everyone is doing at all times as well as let them know what you are doing as well.  It is mindless and frighteningly addicting.

Although facebook can be considered a detriment to the education process, we can harness some of its appeal to create a more connected and open learning environment at the University of Michigan. 

How, you ask?

The answer is thorough blogs.

Blogging is  a relatively new media form but it is revolutionizing articles and online writing and establishing itself as its own medium.  They are often personal and make lighter reading than articles or more formal writing.  It is more accessible and often enjoyable.  Ultimately, blogs are information fused with personality.

The  key is to utilize a campus wide blog engine that every student and professor will be a part of.  The professors would be  required to keep a blog that they update somewhat regularly that explains what they are interested in as well as their research projects and goals.  The writing should not be formal but reveal a little more about who they are and their passion for what they do.  This would allow students to be able to connect with and understand their professors on a different level as well as being a useful tool when choosing classes instead of relying on rate my professor.  Students would also keep blogs that would be a window into their coursework and passions.  This would allow students to connect with each other and understand what people in other departments actually study.  The boundaries between departments are often very finite and after you choose a major, the other fields seem like mysteries.  I would like to know what goes down in West Hall or North Campus, for example.  This would make a big university smaller and allow a whole new perspective.

The other dimension of this concept is using blogs as a teaching tool.  Blogs could be integrated into every class as a small portion of participation.  Students would be given open ended blog posts that encourage them to relate coursework to applications in careers, etc or think about the way they think about or learn the material. These would be graded on participation and quality of thought.  The expanse of the blogs would make cheating easy.  However, the students should work to make their blogs their voice and an honor code may deter cheaters.  Reading these blogs would allow students different perspectives and allow them to make connections that they may not have thought of.  Some classes, especially humanities, could encourage comments and interactions to stimulate conversation.  

This would provide not only practice in writing and thinking, but communicating to a wider audience.  Forms of communication are changing but employers want people who can not only analyze and do tasks but think, apply, and COMMUNICATE!  This is one of the number one things employers look for, even over math and science skills.

So I am encouraging the University of Michigan to use a new medium to connect campus and make connections between content, learning, and applications.  In order to be the leaders and the best, we should prepare our students with skills and knowledge but also the ability to communicate and a voice to face the world with.

Ultimately an epic expansion of what already exists in mBlog.

Now I just need to figure out how to present all this...

A surreal world of perfection

I am currently blogging from the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Palo Alto California.  This is my third visit to Stanford and I cannot get over how unnaturally perfect this place is.  Although the rain and gloom has somewhat dampened its flawlessness this trip, it somehow retains ultimately impressive.  There is immaculately manicured landscaping, quintessential shops, and beautiful buildings.  It is hard to imagine that students similar to ourselves live and study in this environment.  It is odd that they are learning much of the same material and having similar conversations in this alternate reality across the country.  Although I attend a well respected university, I'm still awe-inspired at the Stanford University.  There is an entire next level of respect that I have for these students that call this their home school.  I wonder if this is how some people feel about Michigan students when they visit Ann Arbor.

This has made me wonder about the phenomenon of "ivory tower isolation" and the disconnect of academia.  I get this feeling of an elite exclusive community when I walk Stanford's campus and I am somewhat impressed, yet somewhat disgusted.  I think that education should be respected but the school name should not necessarily be held on a pedestal.  Maybe if people felt that the attainment of knowledge was not so elitist, we would have an overall more educated world.  However, some people are driven to attain high education to attain this exclusive status.  This presents somewhat of a catch-22.

Well, this is not a concept that is going to be resolved in one blog post so I am going to go enjoy the Stanford atmosphere although it is neither warm nor sunny.  It is only 6:12 pm here and I still have four hours until race time.  I will be competing tonight against some of the fastest in the country at the Stanford Invitational and is my first 10k on the track and I am a bit nervous.   The 10k has its own mystique that can only be revealed through 25 laps of fun.

Thanks for pondering with me from across the country.

Go Blue!
Kaitlyn