RACHEL WILSON

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FOREWORD

The University of Michigan seeks to educate and inspire generations of the leaders and best. In pursuit of this goal, the University offers a wide range of academic programs in which students earn degrees, while developing well-rounded collegiate experiences. On February 10, 2012, the University’s College of Engineering extended an acceptance offer to me, which I confirmed with hopes of obtaining a degree in Chemical Engineering. However, after two semesters of a science-heavy course load, I sought out a more well rounded collegiate experience by confirming an acceptance offer to the Sweetland Minor in Writing. The program held further appeal as a method of increasing my marketability to future employers. As I explained in my application letter, “Developing my skill set as an engineer who can communicate is essential to becoming successful in my career; while developing my skills as a creative writer is essential to becoming successful in my personal development” [1, 1]. The balance between these two motivations, professional and personal, drove each decision I made. My entrance to this program fostered my then-stagnated writing development, and my continuing participation in the program has been highly influential in my evolution as a writer.

KEY RESULTS

In pursuing a more well rounded academic experience, I have also found myself becoming more well rounded as a writer. Rather than developing my writing skills in one or two specific fields, I have pursued diverse writing and learning opportunities while completing my academic journey. In short, I have explored the developmental map, rather than making a deliberate (or unwitting) change from one state to another. While learning to adapt to different genres and styles, I have faced the challenge, which I have met both successfully and unsuccessfully, of finding ways to present a consistent voice and persona in my writing. More than anything, these explorations in the name of well roundedness have given me the opportunity to learn how to learn. When I meet a new writing challenge or subject, I have come to be more comfortable with acknowledging my lack of understanding, in order to better learn how to attempt to fill the gaps. Not every gap is filled successfully, or gracefully, but the learning (how to learn) is in the trying.

BACKGROUND

Somewhat uselessly, I’ve cultivated a deep enjoyment in geometry ever since taking a geometry class in the ninth grade. Few things are as pleasing to me as a well-drawn hexagon or a geometric proof that ends with “Q.E.D.” (Quod erat demonstrandum, or “What was to be demonstrated.”) The clean organization of geometric theory satisfies my appreciations for logic and the balance between simplicity and complexity. While I virtually never use geometry in my daily life, knowledge I’ve earned from the process of learning how to learn is knowledge that I do use on a daily basis. This process, of learning how to learn, is one I seek out at the same time as pursuing the idea of becoming “well rounded.” The two go hand in hand.

This whole idea of becoming well rounded has been deeply engrained in my identity and understanding of the world since childhood. In a Writing 200 class, apart from my general coursework, I reflected on my learning history by speaking with my parents about my early development. “My dad noted the depth of our conversations during my young childhood, pointing to my parents’ intentionality in raising me in a conversational environment and my adaptability to logical trains of thought as the sources of my early development as a thinker” [3Db, 1]. In reflecting on my analytical development, I observed how this early growth influenced my desire to apply logic to investigations of unexplored territories.

While these explorations are now primarily academic, they were highly extracurricular in childhood. One day, after a particularly challenging ballet class, my eight-year-old self couldn’t take the frustration of the inordinate amounts of time I needed to spend in the studio. I, a delicate, spindly little ballerina, stormed into my mother’s suburban, slammed the door, and began rattling off (in one, huffing breath) all of the other things I wanted to do with my time—play the piano, become a Girl Scout, et cetera. Afterwards, my mom continued to encourage this pursuit of well roundedness, even when I resented her for it later, when she “required” certain activities of me. By middle school, I was “required” to fulfill three kinds of extra curricular activities: a musical instrument, a sport, and a charity or opportunity for self-improvement. This pursuit of general growth has continued throughout my academic development, especially in my experiences as a writer.

METHODS & MATERIALS

Motivated by a desire to improve my communication skills—a talent lacked by many engineers—and to make myself marketable to future employers, I have deliberately chosen to learn how to write within a number of genres and styles. Because I seek out well roundedness, I sometimes try to do everything. It’s hard for me to listen well when I’m told that I can “do anything, but not everything.” What this really means is that I rarely move from point A to point B—rather, I end up wandering all over the map. Over the years, I’ve learned to concentrate my efforts in a few areas, while still leaving room for the areas that let me achieve a well-rounded experience.

Academically, these areas of chief focus have come to include chemical engineering and writing, which are concentrated by their status as my undergraduate major and minor subjects. I’ve come to learn how to devote my time to and prioritize my chief studies, yet I still can’t help myself when it comes to things like geometry—things that, at face value, have insignificant relevance to my daily life or career training. I can’t help but be fascinated by the concepts presented by other areas of study. Take, for example, the theory of a circle as an infinite polygon.

The perfect circle is essentially a shape with an infinite number of sides. If you start with a triangle, and add a side, you’ll end up with a square. As the number of sides of a shape increase, the length of each side decreases. Continue adding sides, reducing, as you do, the length of each side, and you’ll pass through a hexagon, a decagon, and a hectogon on your way to creating an infinitely sided shape. Once you reach that infinitely sided shape, each side’s length becomes infinitesimally small, trending toward zero. Once a shape’s number of sides approach the limit of infinity, the length of its sides approach the limit of zero.

Within my writing development, this infinite polygon is best represented by the products of my Minor in Writing courses, especially those that have stretched my creative capacities. This ranges from attempts to present my writing ethos in a website or through personal reflections to choosing to write on topics unrelated to anything I’ve explored before. For example, in building a personal crafting website for a Writing 200 course, I experimented in implicit ethos construction [3Da]. Since the textual content of the site was limited, I had to find ways to construct this ethos through site design and textual presentation.

I’ve attempted to apply the tradeoff of an infinite polygon to my skill sets over the years: picking up an increasing number of skills, which is a benefit, but at the cost of only developing those skills to a limited extent. This tradeoff applies to just about every part of my life—I love trying my hand at new things, failing at first, learning from my mistakes, and improving. However, this means I’m only somewhat adept at a lot of things (calligraphy, peer mentoring, sports), rather than highly adept at only a handful of activities. What I’m most adept at is wandering all over the map, making pit stops along the way.

RESULTS & DATA ANALYSIS

This wandering phenomenon is readily apparent in my experiences as a writer. Throughout my coursework at the University of Michigan, I’ve tried my hand at many different genres and writing styles. Like a triangle becoming a rectangle becoming a pentagon, this development has been an iterative process. Many times, I’ve come back to the same place on the map, restarting a new exploration from a “home base” of self reflection or an interactive blog post. Ranging from application letters, to personal & self-reflective pieces, to political theory critiques, to personal storytelling, these writing experiences have led me all over the developmental map. Throughout these explorations, I have found both success and failure in becoming better within specific genres and styles. However, the reflective nature of much of my writing experiences have allowed even those failures to be constructive and provide an overall helpful contribution to my evolution as a writer.

On one of my less-than-successful forays into new territory, I attempted to write a political “min-treatise” for a Political Science 401 course. In arguing for my developed model of feminist citizenship, I use convoluted sentence structure and a highbrow tone to legitimize my case. However, these methods forced my voice to become unrecognizable: “In the feminist’s case, these unequal publics are the two halves of society, men and women, and non-silence provides a non-institutionalized form of opposition to the hegemonic patriarchies present in democratic societies” [3C]. In attempting to make my argument more intellectual, I instead made it more unintelligible and myself more unrecognizable as a writer. In reflecting on this piece, I was able to absorb qualities of the tone of the piece into my writing persona while also discarding undesirable convolutions or inauthenticity. Developing this consistent voice proved even more of a challenge when working together with four other writers.

On a relatively successful exploration of new territory, I worked together with my senior product design team to write the most lengthy, in-depth piece of technical writing I had contributed to at this point in my writing development. This team, comprised of five chemical engineers, myself included; had been developing melaTonight, a sleep aid product. This development plan acted as our proposal for the in-lab development and testing of this patch during the following semester. From title page through the sixth appendix, the document spanned 48 pages and covered everything from the team’s market research findings, to our technological investigations, to our proposed development schedule [3Ba]. As the team’s resident writing guru, I faced the challenge of blending these five writing personas to create a cohesive document that both told the story of melaTonight’s development and garnered interest for investment.

CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS

In seeking the quality of well roundedness, I have explored writing’s developmental map and given myself opportunities to learn how to learn. Although not every attempt at learning a new style or genre has been entirely successful, those that have failed have provided crucial developmental opportunities for growth. Looking forward, I recommend these explorations continue; they will both develop my voice as a writer and improve my communication skills as an employee.

REFERENCES & ATTACHMENTS

[1]       AB NO. RLW-UM-2016: University of Michigan Writing History: Annotated Bibliography.

            Rachel Wilson. Print, 2016.