Dom With a Blog

When thinking about what to do for this multimodal thing, I initially constructed  a powerpoint to get my message across. It was not until my peer review session that I saw one of my classmate’s projects and realized that my format was not allowing me to get all I could out of the assignment. Per her recommendation, I went to canva.com and was pleased with the infographic capabilities available through that medium. Infographics can be printed as posters and placed in locations such as bulletin boards in faculty buildings. Being that my target audience is the group of people who determine resource allocation for the university, this is perfect. This group of school administrators would most likely read a striking poster with a concise message if it was placed in their place of work so I tried to break my point down into a couple bullet points with one quote with some data sandwiched in to legitimize the ideas. I also catered the argument to topics that they would take notice of. I left out the positive effects of athletics on students of a university, instead electing focusing on the benefits that the institution itself gains from its support of successful intercollegiate athletics. In terms of the design of the infographic, I chose green and white as the coloring because it represents both money and sports fields, two main aspects of my discussion. I think that the quote that contains objective data is one of the most important parts of the message I am conveying so I made it stand out with large crimson brackets and placed it towards the middle of the poster so it would draw the viewer’s gaze. I put a line graph by the section on the Flutie Effect because the effect described causes an upward slope in applications to the school like the upward slope seen in the line graph. I put the visual of money next to the part about direct financial gains because the money symbolizes those hypothetical gains. I used a graphic of a smiley face next to the section about assisted communal relations because these improved relations would ideally wind up in happiness for all involved parties. I believe that the hardest part of this assignment was compressing an argument that took up several pages down to less than a page’s worth of writing while still getting the same point across.

Kantz’s article really described my own strategies for studying and writing incredibly accurately. His cautionary tale of Shirley viewing her sources as stories with indisputable facts and not really adding anything to the conversation in her writing pretty much summed up my entire academic life.

I view every source I read as a story with a plot I need to follow. Actually, I view everything I take in, including my own life like that. It’s probably because I’ve watched too much TV and movies since I was little, but I always view everything I come into contact with in terms of a story.

Me, IRL

That’s how I interpret things, and that leads to how I am usually too naive to really challenge the claims made by the author of the sources that I read. I’m used to fictional stories where you cannot really debate the claims made by the minds behind the story because they are making it all up and it is how they say it is. I take this attitude with all I observe as a force of habit so I have to consciously tell myself to read with a critical eye in order to have an active discussion with all my sources.

I will have to constantly remind myself to view the “facts” in my sources as merely claims made by the author so that I can actually, you know, add something to the discussion instead of reiterating previously stated stances.

I sent my survey to the first 60 SCU Broncos I could think of off the top of my head. Since I knew all of these folks, I assumed that I would get a pretty favorable response rate as far as emailed surveys go. I even included a subject line that read, “TAKE THIS SURVEY HELP A BROTHA OUT” in an effort to catch people’s attention.

I also texted about 10 of those people and asked them to take the survey right now and make the people they were with at the time take it as well. I expected about 20-25 responses because I expected at least 1 in 3 people to respond to the email by taking the survey. I only expected 1 in 3 people to respond because I know that I definitely ignore most surveys I get sent.

I thought the survey did a fine job collecting the thoughts of this group of students. If I had to do it all over, I would have sent it out to a broader group of people, and not just my friends, since most of my friends are interested in athletics as I am.

I found out that guys usually think that the student body around them is less enthusiastic than gals do. Males rated the spiritedness of their peers at 2.733 on average on a scale from 1-5 while females rated their fellow broncos at 3.143.

People generally think they are more spirited than the average student, which is unsurprising. Most people have been to a few sporting events. Only one person surveyed had never even been to an SCU sporting event. 45.5% of those surveyed went to between three and seven events this year while 31.8% went to one or two and 18.2% went to at least seven. I would say this level of engagement is about what it should be in relation to their scoring of their school spirit.

A whopping 77.3% agree that they wish the school was more enthusiastic about athletics. Only one person stated that they desire a drop in enthusiasm from the student body. 68.2% of those surveyed believe that more resources should be allocated to athletics no matter the cost to the other aspects of the university and only one person actually said they would not want more funding for athletics.

Overall, this survey reinforced my view that most people, along with myself, are dissatisfied with the current state of Santa Clara athletics and believe the school should make our athletes more of a priority. The student body in general is fairly spirited and goes to a few sporting events a year, but could definitely improve. Although I believe my findings to be very true, I do realize that this is all based on responses from 22 friends of mine so the data isn’t exactly the gospel truth.

I am curious about the positive effects that greater school spirit and athletics pride can have on a school.

Take a gander at this pic, readers. This shows our athletically challenged school playing in the gosh darn ORANGE BOWL. That’s one of the New Year’s Six! For you non-football fans, that means it’s a BIG GAME. We played in this game against Kentucky, an SEC team. That’s amazing! A team from the premier college football conference playing us in one of the biggest games of the year!

We won that game 21-13, FYI. Even before that year, we defeated the perennial powerhouse LSU Tigers (a team with 3 national titles and the 12th most wins of any division I program) twice in the Sugar Bowl. We go from that to having no team at all in less than 45 years. I don’t know about you guys, but that seems nuts to me.

So, when I was perusing my classmates’ blogs, seeking inspiration, I found that my classmate (and suitemate) Jason also picked the fascinating topic of Santa Clara football for his archival research.

He did a great job examining the image of the Sugar Bowl program from 1938 and explaining why the football team ceased to exist. He describes the disbandment by saying, “From my research, funding was discovered to be the main issue but if the school didn’t want to put more money into the football program then maybe this shows why they weren’t successful.” In my research, however, I have found that the reasoning for Santa Clara’s expulsion of the sport from campus was a little more complicated than that. The decision came directly after a legislation from the NCAA forced all schools to compete at the same level across all sports. Since our pigskin wielders were DII and every other Broncos team competed in Division I, the school had a choice to make. They could either promote football to DI or get rid of them. They chose the second and least popular option, as many similarly situated schools did.

Side note: Kinda weird how Johns Hopkins has DI lacrosse but they’re DIII for everything else, huh?

ARCHIVES.

As an enormous Star Wars fanatic, when I think about those two syllables I think of the Jedi Archives, which hold the wisdom gathered over thousands of years by the famous galactic peacekeepers (pictured below).

Google describes the word “archives” as “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people.”

Now, I don’t know about you guys, but that doesn’t instill a rush of curious energy in me. It sounds boring as hell. Therefore, I avoided the archives at all costs.

When I heard we were headed to the archives for our English class a few weeks ago, my thoughts were as follows, “Sweet, not a real class…………Wait, we’re gonna have to read about boring people from like early 1900s for 2 hours.”

The only memorable impact Gaillet made on me was his description of how to physically handle the texts since they were fragile. I wasn’t thrilled when I got there but as I started to look through old school newspapers I found something I’m actually really interested in.

FOOTBALL.

I absolutely ADORE football. My older brother played Division I football at North Carolina, I played for four years in high school, was recruited, and seriously considered playing in college. I’ve been a fantastically large fan my entire life, and didn’t even consider Santa Clara for school initially solely because they do not have a football team. This sport is a big deal to me and is an integral part of my life.

So, when I found some pieces in the old newspapers about my school’s team in the 1940s, I got pretty pumped. I had known that we had a team and was excited to read up on the teams of yore. The more I read about the football squad’s exploits and competition against big-time Division I teams the more I am confused at their departure from existence. I left the archive session with an intense curiosity as to how the Broncos had fallen so far. I will find out and report back, readers.

I do not relish writing most school assignments, ESPECIALLY not essays.

Relative to other types of essays, research papers aren’t too bad. If you don’t know anything about the topic (fairly common occurrence) then it’s not ideal. This is because if you’re supposed to cite sources, then the person in charge of assessing your work will easily know if you’re low-key putting down someone else’s idea, changing the wording a little, and claiming it’s your own since the source of said idea is conveniently located directly under your work.

However, if you don’t have to cite anything then it is that much harder for your grader to investigate.

With all that being said, if I know anything about a topic that I am to research for a report, I refresh myself by looking over materials that I have learned about the topic from previously. If this is my first rodeo with this topic, I simply google the topic and start reading up. After reading a good amount about the topic, I start to organize my essay, thinking about what my talking points and organization will be. I then do a little more research with specific focus on my talking points.

The techniques outlined in the article “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary” (background, exhibits, arguments, and methods) brought some very interesting viewpoints forward. I guess I never really thought about how I categorize my sources. In fact, I never really even knew that source categorization was a thing.

Upon thinking about it, I did it subconsciously and that is probably the extent that I will use this new concept in my writing looking forward. However, I believe that it will prove to be extremely useful when workshopping/discussing my writing with other people. So, to that extent, BEAM rules!

First thing’s first, I’m not a fan of writing. I’ve never particularly liked it, and the abandonment of easy and straightforward five-paragraph  essays in favor of more complicated and lame essays with critical thinking involved added to my displeasure.

This assignment wasn’t fun the first time around, but I thought that formatting it into a blog would be pretty easy. I imagined that I was describing the subject to a friend and tried that out. I quickly realized that I speak way too casually and summarize the points way too much for that to be my blog posting for an English class. I’m way too hip for my own good. It’s a gift and a curse.

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I then tried just gradually changing the vocab in each sense to make it more “youth friendly.”

That just didn’t feel right so I just decided to write it from scratch. Naturally, I decided to take an hour social media/ping pong break before embarking on the final leg of  my blogging voyage.

I tried to find a happy medium between casual and formal language but too often found that I would be too formal in one sentence and too casual in another. I had to make an active effort to balance out my tone.

I also found out pretty quickly that I had to force myself to find visual aids for my writing to fit the accepted blog model since I had never written with visual aids before. Actually finding the visual aids was very enjoyable because it felt like I was just scrolling a social media feed looking for funny gifs and memes that went with what I was talking about.

Another discovery that I quickly made was that using internet sources was SO much easier than quoting from a book.

I just copied and pasted my quotes and then hyperlinked all my sources. It was INCREDIBLY easy to do so.

The formatting for blogs differs SO much from traditional essay writing. Aside from the changes in tone, use of visual media, and overall length, the format of the words themselves is also quite different. Instead of traditional paragraphs, I wrote in groups of a few sentences usually surrounded by a gif or other piece of visual media relating to the topic or tone of the sentence grouping.

One aspect I really dug about the blog was the sources I found online. For the essay, I was forced to use sources from the book. For my blog, however, I was free to surf the web and find my own sources. I’ve always enjoyed writing fact-based research pieces more than my own opinion. Quite simply, it’s easier and is more convincing to me personally as a reader. I was able to quote studies done by the U.S. Census Bureau, Forbes, and other respected sources. 

I had to rethink my argument from my essay, too. At the time I was writing the blog, my grade and feedback for the essay the blog post was based off had been released. I had to revise the source material by improving the fluidity of the ending and putting a little more thought into the analysis.

Overall, this was actually pretty enjoyable as far as English homework goes. It was interesting to write for a teacher in my own voice, and not trying to sound more well-informed than I am and more formal than I ever actually speak to my peers. Searching for and adding the visuals was probably my favorite part of the whole process. I know I like visual aids when I read, so it was cool to pick those out for my readers. I look forward to writing blogs in the future instead of long, boring pieces of writing. RIP essays, and good riddance!

So, if you’re a product of this generation, it’s probably safe to say that you’ve been encouraged to attend college for a while. A hot topic is whether it’s always the best call to hit up a four-year university or maybe there’s some merit to taking alternate options. The way I see it, with a choice as instrumental in the determination the your future is this one, you shouldn’t trust any broad, sweeping statements regarding said choice. It’s important to complete copious quantities of research while getting as specific as you can to your specific situation in order to make a wise, educated decision. 

Since we could listen, us young people have always been told by our parents and others that college is the goal, and if there is any way you can attain the opportunity to attend, you should jump on it. In perhaps the most accurate representation of our generation, “High School Musical 3: Senior Year,” every main character announces a plan to attend a four-year institute. The option of not attending a traditional four-year brick and mortar college is not even acknowledged.

College is sometimes viewed as being this savior of the youth that is a place where everything is improved and you’re able to grow into who you want to be and all that good stuff. Michelle Obama voices her agreement with this school of thought in her commencement address at Bowie State when she says “People who earn a bachelor’s degree or higher make nearly three times more money than high school dropouts, and they’re far less likely to be unemployed. A recent study even found that… people who are more educated actually live longer.” The narrative being written by Obama and countless others is that college improves all aspects of life and can’t be contested by any other option.

By most accounts, college is the only way to go. College graduates with four-year degrees can expect to earn about $1 million more than high school graduates over their lifetimes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Get yourself a graduate degree and guess what? That’s another $400K right there.

This statistic is a bit general, and does not tell the whole story. As you might guess, the fine arts don’t have the best track record for favorable pay upon graduation. Casey Bond, a contributor to Forbes.com, speaks on this occurrence by writing, “Foolishly pursue the arts, and you might be disappointed. An arts graduate from Murray State University in Kentucky, for instance, can expect to make $147,000 less over 20 years than a high school graduate, once the cost of education is factored in.” Her argument in its entirety can be read here. This trend persists across the country, with the high school grad earning more than their counterparts with degrees in arts or education working in the service sector on average. This makes me think twice about the notion that college graduates always earn more than high school diploma-holders.

If you do end up going to college, it’s not even guaranteed that you obtain a degree. It takes at least a few years to complete the school curriculum requirements for the degree. During these years, money could get too tight, you could fail too many classes, your favorite show could get dropped from Netflix, or a multitude of other obstacles can arise, causing you drop out.

At that point, you’ve paid tuition for a few years but still have no degree. In other words, you’ve been made a sucker.

It is important to recognize this possibility that you might start but not finish college.

With that possibility in mind, it is important for prospective students, especially those that could  really be negatively by the cost of school because of their lack of financial security. The reality of this is that families and individuals with smaller budgets feel the effects of college, good or bad, more than those who can drop greenbacks like this.

You might say, “Hey, with all this risk involved in the decision to go to college, what’s the point?” Well, not all the hype about college is unwarranted. College really is a sweet place, and not just because you get WAY MORE scheduling freedom.

In most cases, college plays a big role in helping you get hired, keep a job, and get paid more. You’re also forced to live independently and explore more of the world around you during your stint. You’re going to go through a boatload of new experiences over your time in school. Some of those can be read about here.

Both sides of this argument are legit and have decent points. For students who end up in jobs that are similar to the ones their high school graduate counterparts occupy, college may be a waste of time and money. The view that college is a completely necessary part of an adult’s development and that a degree should be pursued without a thought or bit of rational analysis can be detrimental to young people’s lives. It is EXTREMELY unwise to not consider every aspect of a decision as huge as this one. In most cases, college is probably a good choice, but diligent research is highly recommended by this blogger.

Welcome to the blog, this is where I write stuff. Everyone who dabs loses the ‘ship, FYI.