engagement with the course material
Please choose one assignment from the following options to submit for this week’s response. Please type up your response according to the guidelines listed in the syllabus, and upload your assignment as a WORD or PDF attachment at the bottom of this assignment.
Your response will be evaluated on the basis of: a) how well you demonstrate an understanding of and engagement with the course material; b) the clarity and quality of your writing; c) your overall effort on the assignment. The assignment will be graded on a scale of 0-10 points, and the grade and grader’s comments and grade should be available to you within one week of the original posting date.
The assignment is due on Friday, April 15 at 5 pm, however, I will give a 24 hour grace period, so that you may submit assignments until Saturday, April 16 at 5pm without being penalized. No assignments after 5pm on Saturday will be accepted.
The weekly assignments correspond with the assigned readings and lecture material for the week. The questions posed in each option are designed to help guide your thinking and response. You are not required to respond to all (or even any) of the listed questions, although your responses should be organized in some way. As with any writing assignment, providing sufficient background information to your topic and offering specific examples to support your views will make your ideas clearer and more convincing.
You are welcome to write beyond the minimum page requirement for the assignment.
As noted in the syllabus, please format ALL of your papers in 12 point, Times New Roman font with 1″ margins. This will standardize the amount of writing for every assignment. Your grade may be penalized if you do not follow these formatting guidelines.
Also bear in mind that the volume of writing you produce is not a substitute for quality. In other words, ideas that ramble on without a clear purpose will not garner you extra points (and in fact, if you are way off topic, may lose you points). Writing concisely is valued far more than ‘fluff.’
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Option 1:
Given what you know about UCSC so far, what advice would you have for high school seniors who are contemplating attending this university next year? What factors would you suggest they consider when making their decision about where to attend college? What would you say to try to prepare them for the transition to university life? What information do you know now that you wish you had when you were deciding which university to attend? How might that information changed your decision about college? Write a 2-page response. You may write this assignment in essay format, or in the form of a letter to graduating high school seniors.
Option 2:
Complete Table 2.1, ‘Overview of first-year experiences correlated by student development theory,’ (Andreatta, pp. 35) for yourself. Analyze the results and think about what factors are affecting your success the most. Write a 2-page response explaining why these factors are interfering with your college success, what resources (i.e., people or services) you can seek to find support and what specific things you can do to try to turn these factors into positive forces in your undergraduate education.
Option 3:
Do some online research on the UCSC website to complete the @myU chart on pp. 13 of Andreatta. Write a 2-page response discussing the findings of your research. What information did you find about the awards and grants faculty receive, the kinds of research they are doing and the research centers and institutes housed at UCSC? Also discuss what this information means for you, as an undergraduate student. How can you become involved with some of these faculty or research centers/institutes, or how can you benefit from the types of research the faculty are doing? Be specific about what kinds of scholarly activities you’d like to be involved in, and how you can become involved with them.
Option 4:
Do some online research to complete the @myU chart on pp. 27 of Andreatta. Write a 2-page response discussing the findings of your research. What information did you find about the population breakdown of the university, and city and county of Santa Cruz? If you can, also try to locate and jot down the break down of race, gender and income-level for each population group (demographic information about the city and county can be located at the US Census Bureau). Does any of this information surprise you? How has the population and demographics of the campus and town shaped your undergraduate experience so far? Reflect back to when you were applying to college as a high school senior: did you consider the population and demographics of the colleges and cities you were applying to? Why or why not? Having attended UCSC for at least one quarter now, do you think these are important factors to consider?
