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For my last blog post, I thought it would be interesting to go back throughout my freshman year and SCU and recap and some things that I learned in my first year of college.

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It has been a great year with lots of learning experiences throughout it. It went by so fast and was filled with tons of firsts and lots of new things. Living on my own for the first time came with a lot of responsibility and I learned a lot about managing my time and figuring out what things work best for me when trying to handle school and rowing as well as social life.

With rowing, I realized that I had to make a lot of sacrifices during the year in order to be able to continuously wake up at 5:15 every morning while still getting enough sleep and getting my school work done. This was a great learning experience and allowed me to get my priorities straight while keeping up good work both in and out of the classroom.

Source: LifeHacks

Next year I will be living in my own house which will be a huge change and another great learning experience. This is another step to becoming an adult and being part of the “real world” which is crazy to think about in my mind. See you soon SCU.

-Jack Bedard

One of the bigger troubles I had while writing my research paper was understanding the difference between disproving people’s opinions and understanding them. When initially writing my paper on the conversation of diversity, I tried to disprove other people’s opinions about how campuses are not diverse in the US today.

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I soon realized that this was more difficult then I expected as I would have to disprove every point that the “opposition” expressed in order to fully prove my point as correct. After a bit of thought, I realized that it would be easier to express my point rather than prove it.

Source: Best Animations

In order to do this, I would have to just express my views and express the oppositions views to tell the conversation. This was much easier to do than actually trying to prove a point and the paper ended up flowing together a lot better as a whole. When trying to understand the other peoples opinions, giving a debate on the topic became a lot easier and I was able to express my personal opinions in a more relaxed way as well. It became more of a conversation rather than an argument which is what the paper was supposed to be like in the first place.

This is my final product for my multimodal project. It takes the form of a news broadcast covering the misconceptions of diversity on college campuses. I am playing the role of a reporter in which I go over statistics of minorities on college campuses compared to the conceptions that most students have about diversity on campus. I then go to figure out the reason why students have these misconceptions and explain them in the broadcast.

After going through the whole process of the researching, understanding and writing about the conversation of diversity at college campuses today, I learned a great amount of the research process as a whole.

Some of the important point that I realized were…

1. Always know the credentials of your source
2. Make sure to know both sides of the conversation

First, I learned to always check who is writing your sources. As we learned in class, you can interpret a source in a very different light depending on who the writer is. When quoting a source, knowing the author is very important to understand the viewpoint that they have on the situation. It would really hurt your paper if you used a source in a way that was not intended.

Another thing that I learned was very important is to understand both sides of a conversation or topic before you begin writing. While knowing the side of the conversation which you are arguing for is important, knowing what the other side is trying to prove is very important as well. If you know that information, then you can formulate points that disprove what the other side is arguing, therefore making the points of your argument more convincing to the audience. It is also important to show the audience that you understand both sides of the conversation and that you aren’t blindly arguing one side.

Translating a research argument to a multimodal project is a very interesting thing to do as you are translating writing to different forms of communication whether it be audio or even video formats.

Source: WWE

One could take many routes when transforming their argument to a multimodal project. The author can try to make it simple and easy to understand for the audience and make a prominent statement that has a lot of meaning. Or it can be a more complex description of your argument that makes the audience think about it a bit more and have to understand the argument that you are trying to make.

Personally, I am going to try and make a multimodal argument that is concise and to the point but is a very moving image. I plan on using photoshop to put statistics of college diversity on an image of a variety of ethnic faces.

Source: Adobe Support

I am going to put statistics of what people think diversity is at college campuses versus statistics of what the diversity levels actually are. This will be able to show the concept that I talk about a lot in my researched argument of past perceptions versus modern realities of diversity and how the general population conveys a uneducated view of diversity on college campuses.

When writing a research paper, there is usually a section of the conversation that is found where more information is needed to fully understand that portion of paper. This gap where there is a hole in the information can spread throughout your paper and leave the audience wondering why it isn’t touched upon.

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In relation to diversity on college campuses, my gap is the lack of student opinion I could find to add some more depth to my paper.

I think it is very important to know the student opinion of diversity on campuses when examining this topic as a whole. This is because the students are the ones that are “on the ground” and experiencing the vibe of the campus in real time. Their opinions don’t take statistics into account, but rather a general feeling which I think is a very integral part of understanding diversity.

While I did get some student opinions expressed via my student survey that I did for SCU, I could not get a wide range of opinions from other schools simply because they were not available online and I didn’t have the time or resources to survey other schools from across the country on diversity their campuses. At Santa Clara however, I found it interesting how most of the students thought the population was not diverse at all, while in reality the campus is very diverse. I thought that this sort of notion would be similar at schools like SCU across the country so I based some of my views in my paper off of that data.

One important part of writing a research paper is being able to integrate your sources into your paper in an effective manner while also remembering to give credit. This sometimes proves to be a difficult task and can make or break a paper. If done properly, then your paper will be able to express a sufficient mixture of your opinions as well as those of the scholars that you are reading about. However if it is done incorrectly then your paper could end up sounding like a jumbled mess that doesn’t make much sense. When integrating sources, you must do a two important things…

1) Express Credibility

2) Identify Opinons

All of these points are important for different reasons. First, expressing credibility is very crucial because it tells the reader whether the information you are quoting is trustworthy or not. If credibility is not expressed the source could just be some random person than knows nothing about the topic at hand and therefore doesn’t help prove any points.

Source: Harry Potter

When integrating sources, it is also important to identify the sources opinion. If this is not expressed in a legitimate way than the reader could think the source is saying something that it is not. Using direct quotes throughout the paper is a good way to make sure that the reader understand exactly what the author is saying rather then just paraphrasing.

When beginning to build my bibliography, I started with a very wide range of search criteria so that I could start to understand my conversation to the full extent. I researched all my academic articles on OmniFile through the SCU library database. At first I began to research more opinionated articles on diversity on college campuses so I could find out what scholars thought about the topic as well as what the general population felt.

After this, I realized that these opinions being expressed needed to be back up by concrete facts in order to understand the conversation to the fullest. If there was no legitimate evidence behind the claims that were being made in my paper, then who would be able to believe what I was saying?

Source: Net Animations

Due to this, I went on to find a multitude of surveys that gave legitimate statements about many things. Some of these topics concerned certain diversity levels at different schools as well as whether or not diversity helped or hindered the learning environment of the overall undergraduate population at certain schools.

With this data, I was able to come to many of my own conclusions about the topic which helped provide an alternative perspective in the paper and was a very important part of adding to the conversation as a whole.

Given that my research topic for this quarter is diversity at SCU and the Multicultural Center (MCC),  I thought it would be interesting to do some more background on diversity in the United States during the time that the MCC was created. Was there a specific movement in the US that created a need for diversity centers on college campuses?

When doing some further research, I found out that in 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed that allowed any undocumented immigrants immediate legal residency with an option to pursue full citizenship after five years.

Source: Inhabitat

This granted 2.7 million immigrants a legal citizenship which resulted in an increase of their influence in American culture. This in turn also resulted in an increase of college attendance by immigrants.

Due to this increase of legal immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds on college campuses, it makes a lot more sense that an organization like the MCC would be created in order to preserve the rights of these students on campus.

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This information will add a lot of good background to my paper since I was previously lacking on a reason why the MCC was created. Now I can go into much more depth about this reform in my final paper and figure out some more affects that this change had on diversity at Santa Clara.

When looking for an image that spoke to my research question of the Multicultural Center and diversity at SCU, I came across a great modern day example that is the pinnacle why the MCC was created and also shows what is stands for today. The image below shows an anti-immigration protest in which the protesters are trying to gain support for the deportation of immigrants in the US.

Source: Social Issue Journal

While the people in this image have the right to protest issues that they feel strongly about, this does a great job of showing the animosity that some US citizens have towards others with a different ethnic background living in the United States today. As I refer to in my archival draft, colored students like Gabriel Negrete felt like they was looked down upon by the majority of the white population that attended the University. This kind of abhorring attitude can clearly belittle a person and make them feel the need to unite with others against this crippling power.

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After figuring this out, I can now have a more complete sense of how the culture surrounding minorities at SCU resulted in the creation of the MCC. Due to the large amounts of profiling that occurred, the minority students decided to band together to form a steadfast organization in which they could push for equal standards and respect. Images like this one would be great to add to my paper in order to show the animosity that minorities had to deal with over the years.