ESSAY #3: Research Project
Length: 10 pages
Format: typed, double-spaced, 10-12 point font, 1-inch margins
This is the big one. This is your opportunity to research a topic of your choice and present your results in a polished, professional, and engaging essay. Your project should evolve out of the exploratory essay you have already written (with rare exceptions), and it should reflect weeks of reflection, research, writing, and revision. Think of it as the culmination of your first year of college writing.
While you should choose a topic related to our course theme (Work & Play), it is still relatively easy to tailor the project to your own specific interests. Interested in a specific career? Investigate it: what does it entail? How has it evolved? How must it adapt in the 21st Century?
What specific challenges interest (or plague) those who are involved in this field? What potential solutions exist? Or perhaps you might want to analyze a work-play or leisure-related issue that’s “closer to home”: identify an existing problem in higher education today—explain the causes, offer a solution. As long as you define and focus a clear project with identifiable avenues of research, I encourage you to bring your interests to this assignment.
Think of this project as a way for you to explore a potential field of interest, a way to enter into a conversation in which professionals involved in that field are already engaged. It needs to move beyond a “report-type” project (in which you simply list or compile information); your researched essay will require you to employ analysis and critical thinking skills as you encounter, synthesize, and question your sources. Then think about the ways that you, as a writer, can illuminate this topic for those of us who may not know much about it.
A key component of this project is your ability to locate, read, and evaluate outside sources as you think about your topic (a minimum of five sources). Interviews with relevant individuals are appropriate (even desired) as potential source material. As you write your essay, you should be able to effectively incorporate these ideas into your paper. I do not want you to drop quotations or paraphrases into the essay simply because they are required; it does not take a lot of thought to string a handful of outside sources together. The purpose of researching and incorporating the material into your own writing is to demonstrate your ability to take part in academic discourse, to participate in an ongoing scholarly discussion.
Ultimately, I want you to walk away from this project with a much deeper understanding of a complex situation related to the course themes. Because we will be sharing our insights with each other as a class, we will also benefit from each other’s newfound “expertise.”
My Essay will focus on the idea of hazing. The main question will be what are the intentions of hazing? To what extent is hazing beneficial? It will also compare hazing to other examples of barriers to entry or trials and rituals. Essientially, the essay will examine modern hazing at various schools and discuss the psychology of it before explaining how hazing can be made more beneficial.
