Assignment

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 PDF or WORD 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 grader's comments and grade should be available to you within one week of the original posting date.

The assignment is due on Saturday, March 10th at 1pm without being penalized.

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.

Option 1:

If you are not involved in any campus organizations yet, think about and do a little research on what organizations are available for you to get involved with at UCSC. Consider the various types of opportunities Andreatta lays out in Chapter 8: academic and curricular, co-curricular, and 'other exciting options.' Think about the various organizations that have given presentations in our class, and possibly do some research on the SOMeCA or SOAR website to identify resources and organizations you'd like to get involved with in the future. In a 2-page response, discuss your experiences with these organizations in the past tense. That is, write a fictional reflection that discusses what you imagine getting involved with these organizations is like. Describe what steps you took to get involved, what roles you undertook, what challenges you faced, what the experience felt like. The purpose of writing in the past tense is to motivate and encourage you take action to become more involved in the future (a sort of reverse psychology).

Option 2:

Are there any leaders--past or present, at the university, in your community, family or society-at-large--who you greatly admire? If so, write a 2-page response describing the person and discussing the qualities and characteristics you most admire about them. Also discuss what personal, organizational or societal challenges the person might have faced to become the leader they are today, and what strategies you think (or know) the person undertook to overcome these challenges.