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.