After a long quarter, here it is! All the research, time spent in the library, and hours of fidgeting with Camtasia, I have produced my multimodal project!

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I wanted my video to speak to all students who have a sense of school spirit. Therefore, I hope mostly high schoolers and college students see this. While I do not mean to say that younger students don’t have school spirit, I just believe that high school and college students have better odds of actually changing their campus to promote more pride within their student body.

In addition, I found myself getting more involved with extracurriculars during my high school years. So to those who are not as involved I implore you to reach out and trying something out! You’ll find many new groups of students who do wonderful things you never knew about.

So with all that in mind, here’s my video. Check it out!

I hope that students find this video helpful in pushing them to get involved with school to help spread the positive energy and sense of pride that comes from school spirit.

I also hope that students realize one doesn’t have to be super involved with the athletic programs at your respective school to help contribute to school spirit. Everything contributes to school spirit and those schools who recognize every aspect of student life have the most driven and passionate students.

In all, I cannot wait to find more things to do at SCU to enhance my time here. Already I’m involved with a new fraternity (ATO) and I’m a Japanese Student Association board member, but I really want to get involved elsewhere too!

Just Like This Pikachu, I’m Shocked At All The Things I Can Do At SCU – Source

Sadly I have to wait until next year. But once next year starts, I’ll be hitting the ground running, looking for things to do to spread the energy and the pride that I have for SCU!

Research isn’t so bad after all. Before I took my critical thinking and writing class, I would dread the very thought of research. But now, I see myself conducting research in everything I do. From the simple act of reading a text to formulating arguments, I have conducted some form of research along the way.

Of all of the articles I have read, I particularly found Klein’s article, “What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One—and How Can We Get Students to Join Us?” the most interesting and applicable in my own research methods.

Through his article, I have found his idea of “hunter and gatherers” the most profound and applicable since everyone can be categorized into one or the other, or both.

• Hunters—seek information and persist to find exactly what they need
• Gatherers—work with information presented to them—sort of like a sponge

I have reflected over this past quarter and determined that I am a hunter. When I write outlines for arguments or drafts for papers, I always go and seek the information since it probably exists somewhere.

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I know I am definitely not a gatherer because of how determined I can get to find one piece of information. It may take my 20 to 30 minutes for me to find the perfect quote or statistic to back up my argument.

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Thinking back towards the beginning of the quarter, I remember when I was researching in SCU’s archives, I sought out information about school sports. I specified what I needed down to SCU’s football team which is fairly specific given all of the other athletic teams I could have chosen.

The way I researched for arguments and information for SCU’s football team is much like the game of “Where’s Waldo?” While I honestly do find the Where’s Waldo books more interesting—I will not give up a single page without having found Waldo—both researching SCU school sports and these books are almost too similar. I won’t give up my topic unless I completely fail at finding what I need, but in most cases I do, it just takes forever.

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I do see some troubles in the future for myself though. For example, if I am given a novel in which I have all the information already gathered, I may find it hard to choose between all of the pieces of information. I wish Klein went into detail about how to choose the most appropriate evidence or how to decide between different pieces of gathered information.

Sure there may not be one answer or one method to this problem, I still wished Klein provided some support for me since taking gathered information is not my strength.

I guess, in the future, I still have a bit of work to do in regards to how I conduct my research.

As the year comes to a close, I have felt nothing but joy. In fact, I haven’t felt very stressed at all. All I can think about is being able to go home, how happy I am to have completed my first year, and I’m eager to dive into my next year at SCU.

But how can I not feel stressed, especially with finals approaching? 

To tell you I have to give you some background information. Back in high school, I took a positive psychology course which I mentioned earlier in my blog. This course taught me many strategies for knowing how to exhibit calmness in times of high angst and how to help others do the same.

When we particularly focused on the stress that is created by school, we watched a very intriguing TED Talk by a woman named Kelly McGonigal. I highly recommend watching this video for all 15 minutes. It has changed my view on stress and has made me an overall happier person.

For me, this video reshaped how stress affects me. I’m trying to make stress my friend and so far in college it’s actually been helping. So from my experience trying what Kelly McGonigal suggests, I have nothing but success to report.

I am so fortunate to have been showed this video. I know stress and anxiety are way too common and prevalent in colleges across the states, especially during finals week.

Instead of believing stress is bad for us and instead of trying to push it away as we cram for exams, we should be studying by using stress as the source of our energy. In the words of Kelly McGonigal:

I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. – Kelly McGonigal

We should all rethink our ways of dealing with stress. I am a huge supporter of this idea of hers and believe everyone should become aware of it. We should all make stress our friend.

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Just earlier today, I had remembered to write on my blog. I did not mean to “forget,” but I guess it just left my head for a bit. Somewhere between walking from the SCU dining hall to my dorm, I really started to question blogs.

Thinking…Thinking…Thinking… – Source

I find blogs interesting in that they convey—what I think are—professional opinions or stories in such a casual setting in that we then think of these opinions or stories as casual. In other words, because this is a blog, you may read this and think it’s a simply short story or quick brain dump.

Okay, but what about professional blogs? I guess I see that blogs are professional because the one who writes them is revealing their thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, and many other private information that is subjected to debate or willing to be responded to. However, despite this professionalism, part of me still does not value the information quite as confidently when compared to opinions from news websites, wikipedia, etc.

In evaluating my blogs, they are no where close to being “professional.”

I don’t know why these thoughts run through my head. In some ways it’s frustrating and some ways it’s intriguing.

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Despite this thought and doubts of my own writing, I still like blogs. It feels like I’m always talking to someone and someone’s always there to listen. I can convey a story the exact way I want, in attempt to share it with people in the way I want. Of course, no one will connect with it spot on, but the thought of that is still nice to believe.

On the other hand, sometimes I feel my information and words are lazy or don’t break the ice enough. Basically, I don’t know if I’m diving deep enough into my thoughts. This trouble doesn’t stop me from liking blogging, it’s just I wish I had a well-formed idea of how people take my blog.

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In all, in reflecting on this very blog post I just typed, I feel like I stumbled upon a good point. I believe in essays, the author has to cater to a selected audience in the most effective way possible, but when compared to blogging, the author/writer has no targeted audience other than those who will stumble across this blog.

So then, it’s comforting to write a blog because I essentially don’t have to care who reads this; apart from my English teacher who will be peering into these posts. Other than that, the idea of blogging has settled in my brain, and I am fully comfortable of writing about whatever and to whoever.

To start, I enjoy projects! Through projects, I get to be creative, use my own type of presentation style, and produce a finished piece that targets a specific audience of my choosing. If I could, I would replace all exams with projects.

How I Am With Tests – Source

Recently, for my critical thinking and writing class, I have been assigned to translate my research argument—arguing the claim that more variables matter to students than just athletics when it comes to school spirit—into a media project. I was very pleased to hear that I could create something not essay-like, and to be frank, I don’t know if I could write another essay.

It’s Not That I Don’t Like Essays! Just It’s Good To Change – Source

For this media project, I thought of a couple of options:

• School-wide calendar for all students and faculty to see
• Educational video about my findings targeted to university faculty
• 1-2min tutorial video for students to learn of how to have a better time in school and how to use the calendar

With all these options, I immediately turned to the huge calendar idea. This idea was the most attractive to me because at Santa Clara University, we do not have a calendar that reports on the events across all athletic teams, clubs, etc. on the entire campus.

This Calendar Is What I’m Thinking Of – Source

You may ask, “how will a calendar help with promoting school spirit?” And my answer is that I have found that in order to increase school spirit, one must know which activities to engage in. By having an easily accessible calendar that advertises ALL of the school-wide events, ALL students will be able to see ALL events.

For example, lets take the SCU women’s soccer team. By combining all events into one calendar, those athletes will be able to see that a multicultural club or religious activity is happening before/after practice, in which otherwise they wouldn’t have heard about it.

In addition, let’s take the most service-driven student who may be involved with all community service clubs on campus. Perhaps one day the athletic team does a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness. Without a calendar that incorporates all aspects of campus life, the service-driven student would never know of the good-deed event the athletes put on, which makes him miss out on a great opportunity.

The Calendar Can Help You Get Involved! – Source

Sure you could say that this idea itself is lazy and could be done in 10 minutes by using Google Calendar. However, for many of my friends and myself, I just find it so much easier and convenient to have everything in one calendar. To be honest, I am lazy at certain things here and there, and updating my calendar is one of them. If you are like me, then this idea makes total sense as you do not need 3 or 4 calendars that separate all of the events. Plus, with everything in one calendar, you know you won’t be missing out on any opportunities to be involved with campus!

In no way is this idea perfect, it’s still in the works. But for now, I am super excited for the project. Maybe I’ll even try and incorporate Camtasia. See the blog post right before this to see all the fun I had with it!

In all, this calendar could be the tool to get everyone involved! It’s time to find out.

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What is Camtasia? Prior to a session in SCU’s library with my critical thinking and writing class, I honestly had no idea what this program was. At first I predicted it was a computer arts program, but to my surprise it was actually a movie editing program.

I have created many videos using movie editing programs: iMovie is my favorite and most used by far. And with learning about Camtasia, I started to get nervous as the possibility that my dedication to iMovie was now subject to change.

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Trying Camtasia was intimidating because I honestly dislike change. Change presents so many different variables and some of these curveballs may not even be known to you. For myself, in particular, I fear any change regarding technology. I had to change phones from the classic flip phones that took forever to send a text message, to an iPhone which was quite the scare. So this change from iMovie to Camtasia was hard to accept.

To my surprise, transitioning from iMovie to Camtasia was one of the best changes I have ever made!

The tutorial at the library was very easy to understand and provided me with the necessary tools to create the basic Camtasia video. Here’s mine! Check it out 🙂

I hope you enjoyed it because if you couldn’t tell, I really do enjoy Camtasia now. There are so many more options that are simple and effective in creating a fun video! Really, the change from iMovie to Camtasia was completely positive for me.

Camtasia is the coolest new thing!

On Tuesday, I visited the SCU library with the rest of my critical thinking and writing class to learn about peer review and recall the process of appropriately summarizing sources. The librarian, Gail, first posed the question, “What is peer review?”

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I thought to myself and recalled from a psychology course that peer reviewers were people who carefully edited the articles researchers, authors, and scientists draft. These drafts undergo long periods of time which take anywhere from a few months to years. After the editing phase, the articles are then proposed to credible journals and/or online sites. These publishers are selective as each publisher has certain criteria that an article must relate to in order to be featured.

Academic Journals Are Not Like Regular Magazines – Source

In the future, I plan on pursuing an occupation in the field of therapy or counseling psychology. Either path includes many opportunities for my own work to be published, and by now knowing of peer review, I know a little more of what to expect in my career field.

Once we established what peer review was, we transitioned to how to summarize sources. While this skill would have been valuable for the annotated bibliography paper we were assigned, I still found this lesson as a good refresher for future papers.

I Just Thought This Was Funny – Source

My partner JJ Burwell and I were tasked with summarizing a group of random science-related articles. I found that I need to improve the way I display who the authors are in each summary. I noticed how I only dig as far back as to what field of study the authors are, but I never dive into if any have outstanding credentials or previous successful pieces of work. These small details should be included because with the information the reader can fully grasp the credibility behind the author. In addition, the reader can then know exactly whose work to pursue further if it suites them.

Even if I knew generally how to summarize an article, readdressing the process never hurt. I especially benefitted from the time in the library because I altered my process of summarizing and now know a more effective and informational method.

I searched “school spirit” and you’ll never guess what kind of stuff is out there. When searching the OmniFile database, I stumbled upon articles ranging from measuring school spirit to how Jell-O is fostering school pride. I know exploring the Jell-O article sounds interesting cause well, who doesn’t like Jell-O? However, I am focusing on this gap that has appeared with the presence of all of my articles.

My Research Map – Source: Cory Gong

This roadmap is a visual of how I believe all of my articles connect. From the photograph, I have connected all of the sources I have found already, to an article that claims to measure school spirit. I initially thought this was the end of my process, but then I found an article claiming there to be professional teaching.

The article about professional teaching described how this idea possibly leads to professional pride in one’s school. Therefore, this article brought up the idea of a professional school spirit, which I found to be fascinating.

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The requirements for professional teaching included many aspects: attention to detail, attention to well-being of students, and many more. I then thought that the requirements for professional teaching could also be applied to further school spirit.

However, I realized that my prediction—of treating the professionalism of school spirit and the professionalism of teaching as the result of the same variables—is not guaranteed. Therefore, a gap emerges between getting from measuring school spirit to claiming whether or not a school’s spirit is “professional.” In other words, I do not know what qualifies school spirit as professional despite the leading example that professional teaching presents.

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This gap brought forth some more questions for myself: What does a school’s spirit need to be professional? Is there even a requirement that could be professional? Even further, do we need to categorize school spirits into professional and unprofessional and what are the possible outcomes of that situation?

Kantz, writer of “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively,” had more similarities to my own research methods than I had expected. While I have come a long way from my old research ways, some ideas brought forth by Kantz are still applicable today.

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First, one idea that Kantz addresses is the difference between fact and an argument. Kantz uses the example of the Earth is round. The status of fact that the Earth is round is because we have a “mutual agreement that ’round’ is an adequate description of the Earth’s actual imperfectly spherical shape” (67).  Here, Kantz wants us to see that what makes a statement fact is not how “true” the statement is, but that the statement is what is most agreed on (67). In extreme cases and in my own research, I am a victim of accepting facts because I agree with it. That is not to say I do not deny statements backed with factual tests, I merely mean to state that when conducting research from here on out, I need to know I am analyzing arguments that may seem like fact. In other words, facts are just a “consensus of opinion” we encounter (67-68).

Margaret Kantz – Source

Second, is the way in which I list my evidence. Evidence that is presented as a list—First ___, second ___, etc.—is comfortable to us writers because it reflects the structure of a story. A story is easy to follow and often times has a moral lesson in the end. These morals of stories are just like the arguments we are presented and then have the choice of accepting. The story method is one method I use many times when presenting information I receive.

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It is very simple to tell a story from experience because our experiences are the facts of our story. Sometimes, however, we tell a story and we have no emotion from our audience. Maybe we did something wrong, or maybe they just didn’t care. Either way, one way to help enhance our storytelling is when we retell an experience with facts, one should strategically place the more powerful events near the end as the punch-line; hoping to impress our audience.

The same type of structure is what Kantz emphasizes. In other words, we should veer away from storytelling and gear our writing towards synthesizing in order to gain more confident persuasive evaluations by our audiences.

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Kantz arguments in favor for strategically displaying of our argument, coupled with my reformed idea of facts and arguments, helps my research improve. The improvement is effective once I can present facts as arguments and back arguments with facts, all while presenting them in an orderly fashion that gains the trust of my reader. In all, my story telling has evolved into a form of synthesis.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there!!

May 14, 2017 is probably one of the most important days of this year. This year, I am lucky to still be close to my family even though I am in college.

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To celebrate Mother’s Day, my dad took my family out to Fleming’s Steakhouse which is known for their premium steak, fish, and many other dishes! I decided to get a Miso Chilean Sea Bass with an arugula salad and horseradish. The rest of my family got some type of meat, but that’s what’s usual for my family since I do not prefer meat.

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Anyway! I am so grateful for my mother! I don’t know if I said that yet, but I just wanted to write a small little piece dedicated to her.

My mother, Mimi Funabiki, is the strongest and most caring mother I could have asked for. I remember as a child she would cook me meals and tend to every scrape, cut, or bruise. She would read me my favorite bed time stories; If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Green Eggs and Ham were among my favorites.

Source – Cory’s Photo

My mother has been there for my football injuries which include: torn ACL, fractured wrist, concussions, and dislocated shoulders on multiple occasions. Despite the number of injuries, many times I have been impatient, and countless times I have asked for her help, she has never let me down.

My mother doesn’t like cheesy things so I know she’ll hate the last sentence I wrote. However, you just have to say things the way they are to your mom’s right? I mean, I love my mother, and there is really no other better way to say it: “Thank you for everything you have done for me, from cooking for me, to tending to my injuries. You have also been an active listener and source of my perseverance, I am grateful to have you in my life!”