One final to take. Two essays to turn in. Three books to return. Then it’s summer time! This summer I will be playing baseball in Marysville, California (middle of nowhere) until the beginning of August. It’s going to get pretty tiring but I’m super excited. In terms of school, I thought about taking a summer course because I’ll have a lot of time but decided not to so that I can focus on baseball and getting better. However, I do want to do a lot of writing this summer. Whether it be journaling, poetry, or even a short novel, I want to try to write as much as I can to keep my mind sharp and provide good balance to my baseball days. I also want to decide on a major and possibly think about what I see for my future. Granted, I’m only 19 years old and have three years left of college but I do think it’s important to recognize my interests and have an idea of how I want to impact this world during my adult life. Growing up has always scared me and if I could I would stay college age forever. Although, the older I get the more I think about what the future holds for me and I get anxious to find out. Finishing this first year of college is one more step in that direction and I’m going to continue to enjoy ever day that I have.

While classes are over and my work for English is done, I do still have two essays to turn in and one final to take. These things usually stress me out but not this time. I enjoy finals week now because I don’t have class so I have much more time to get stuff done and the two essays I have are research papers with annotated bibliographies. Coincidence? I’m an experienced vet now with these thanks to CTW this quarter and am more than confident with the strategies I’ve learned that I will apply with these writing assignments. I still don’t enjoy research papers and would rather not have to do them but things could be worse. I’m excited to see how I do on the papers with the concepts I learned in CTW and if they prove to be effective in other classes.

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I probably should have started these papers by now given that they are due in two days but I’ll get around to it. I’m going to go nuts when I submit that final paper and summer begins. Yewww! ALMOST THERE!

As of today I’m officially done with class at Santa Clara this year! Sadly, I do still have papers that are due and a one final to take next week but regardless, I am celebrating. Crazy to think that my first year of college is already over, but then again it was a very long year.

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I’m more than happy with my decision to come to this school. I had a tough year of baseball, but I’ve never learned more in school and the people here are amazing. I’ve made friendships that will last a lifetime, grown stronger in my faith, and have never been more thankful for the life I have. I’ve also grown up tremendously physically, emotionally, and mentally. I’ve learned how to take care of myself (not fully yet), while improving my time management skills. Laundry is a piece of cake now and while I still hate cleaning, I’ve gotten much better at it. I can’t wait to be back here in the fall and see what the next three years at this school has in store for me.

Oh boy am I glad to be done researching…at least for this year. While this spring quarter was the most research I’ve had to do for essays, I did learn more about research than I’ve ever learned. Concepts from BEAM (Background, Exhibit, Arguments, Method) to “hunting and gathering” are forms of research that I don’t think I ever would’ve had the opportunity to learn about if it weren’t for CTW. These concepts helped me greatly throughout my research project this quarter and I’m sure I would have stressed much more if I hadn’t read these articles with strategies for how to research. It’s easy for me to blow off reading in some of my other classes but there’s no way I could for this one with how often we had to blog about it and how lost I would have felt had I not read.

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There’s no doubt that I will have many more research papers and projects throughout my next three years here at Santa Clara, but thankfully I have these research strategies that will hopefully continue to be helpful. My classmates may laugh when they see me in the library and I tell them that I’m busy “hunting and gathering” but I’ll be the one smiling when it pays off in the end.

The process of translating my research essay into a multimedia project was a lot easier than I expected. The hardest part was deciding how I wanted to present my argument but once I thought of an Instagram page I knew exactly how to handle it. I’m very familiar with this source of social media and felt confident that I could get my argument across while using quality pictures that convey my message. I also included a strong bio that encourages followers to DM (direct message) for further information about this topic or if they have any questions they wish to be answered.

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For the pictures I captioned, I decided what to write based on the points of my argument in the research paper. Each post provides a separate point I made with a picture relating to the point. The last post explained that the page will continue to post weekly with more information. If I were to continue with this page I would follow college students and future college students in hopes that they would follow back, tell their friends, and take the negative aspects of football into consideration when making decisions regarding college.

In translating my research project into a multimedia project, I chose to create an Instagram page that shows college students the negative effects of college football on small universities. I tried to speak to a younger audience and use language and social media tactics that would appeal to them. The link is below and I hope you enjoy!

https://www.instagram.com/collegefootballridiculous/

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It has now been exactly thirteen hours since I finished that dreaded research paper and I can’t hardly begin to explain how happy I am to be done with it. Aside from the fifteen page paper I had to write for my religion class in the winter, this one definitely took the most out of me. It could have been worse though because thankfully, I was writing about a topic I was interested in and a topic that I have been researching all quarter. I also learned a great deal of useful information about research-based writing as well as about myself as a writer.

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I was fairly happy with how the paper turned out, given the circumstances. I was very pleased with the information my sources provided and never struggled with a lack of information to support my argument. Synthesizing the sources was a bit challenging and I maybe could have done a better job of that but I felt my overall argument was clear and served a purpose in the conversation I was researching. This research paper felt much more structured than any research paper I’ve ever done and it was nice to have clear and concise teaching on how to go about it.

Today in class we learned how to use Camtasia and here’s a sample video I made in class. It is a voice-over of a speech from my favorite movie. Hope you enjoy!

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My territory, as talked about in previous posts, is college football. I’m curious as to what kind of impact the implementation of college football at SCU would have on students and the university. This matters to me because I’m a college football fan with what I’d like to consider a high level of school spirit. However, I do not see much of this same school spirit at SCU and I would like this to change. College football is a billion dollar industry that has universities adding programs every year. Adding teams has both positive and negative effects for the schools which is why I would love to see how Santa Clara could handle such a drastic addition to it’s athletics.

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The gap I intend to bridge revolves around the question of how Santa Clara could implement a football team and if it would have the same or different effect football has on the bigger, successful schools. Many of the sources I reviewed talk about football’s impact on large, high student population, Division 1 schools whereas the smaller school’s football programs aren’t as widely covered. Therefore, the sport may effect Santa Clara in different ways than it does at schools like Ohio State or Alabama. Also, many of these schools have the funding to pay for football’s budget while Santa Clara would have to develop a booster club and raise the money needed to sustain a team. In addition, revenue would be very unpredictable because who knows how many of the only 5,000 undergraduate students at SCU would show support. I look to address these issues in my research paper next week.

Kantz appears to be a literary genius who has the whole writing thing figured out, so to compare her styles to mine is absurd. However, a few of her points have come up in my research process and I will strive to implement more.

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In Kantz’ “Helping Students Use Sources Persuasively” she talks about how students must do more in research essays than simply retell the story that the sources tell. They need to avoid believing everything they read is true and state authors’ bias or arguments that serve a purpose rather than just agreeing or disagreeing with evidence. Lately, I’ve been doing a better job of “bringing something to the table” when writing. I’ve tried to read rhetorically, as Kantz states, and step into an ongoing conversation as opposed to picking a side.

I like how Kantz uses the strategy of bridging gaps between the Encoder (person writing), Decoder (audience), and Topic (reality). These gaps contain questions and by answering any one of these questions in research-based writing is a way to voice one’s thoughts that can be relevant in an argument. I feel that I’m getting better in this area but like anything else, writing is a process that requires plenty of practice with new strategies before they become natural.