Progress Notebook

Assignment Overview

Throughout the quarter, you’ll be doing some short informal writing once a week. These short entries are generally an opportunity for you to briefly reflect on the work you’re doing that week, to make connections to the major projects in the course, and to otherwise think about how the work you’re doing in this course intersects with your personal and career goals.

Your progress notebook should be written conversationally – it doesn’t have to be formal academic writing. You should keep each week’s entry in your individual folder in our shared Google Drive. (If you’d rather keep all your responses in a single file, that’s fine; if you would rather create a new file each week, that’s also fine. As long as I can find all your work in your individual folder, you should be good to go.)

Your progress notebooks should be at least 300 words. Entries are due by the end of the day on Friday of each week.

You can expand the selections below to see the specific prompts for each week.

Spend a few paragraphs answering the following questions:

  • How do you feel about writing? Do you like it? Find it easy? Time consuming? Frustrating? Do you like some kinds of writing, but dislike others?
  • What’s your experience with research? How would you define “research?” What’s the most interesting and fulfilling research you’ve done in school? What about outside of school?
  • What is something you want me to know about you?
  • What is something you want to know about me?
  1. Read through the Job Materials prompt.
  2. Make notes, highlight, annotate… do what you need to do in order to understand the prompt and what it is asking of you.
  3. Rewrite the prompt in your own words. (This can be a very short summary of what the prompt is asking you to do or how you might explain it to someone who doesn’t have the prompt.)
  4. Spend about 10 minutes writing down your initial thoughts. How do you feel about it? What ideas do you have? What possible employers or positions might you investigate? Will you focus on jobs or internships? With that kinds of organizations? What are your concerns?
  • What was the most helpful suggestion from your peers? Why?
  • What do you think was the best suggestion you offered to someone else? Why do you think it was a helpful suggestion?
  • What did you learn/gain by reading your peers’ projects? Do you think it will help you with your own project? How/why?
  • What is the next step that you plan to take with your draft?

Do some initial research into the ideas your group has about the proposal project. The goal here is merely to determine whether your idea(s) are potentially possible, in a very initial exploratory sense.

  • How did you research those ideas?
  • What did you find?
  • Would the idea be a possibility for this project?
  • What role did you take for the market research assignment?
  • What challenges do you think you’ll face as you do the research for your section? Why?

How would you describe the process of researching for the market research section? Was anything surprising? Confusing? How did you find and decide on your sources? What sources did you select, and why?

  • What role did you take for the design assignment?
  • What challenges do you think you’ll face as you do the research for your section? Why?

How would you describe the process of researching for the design section? Was anything surprising? Confusing? How did you find and decide on your sources? What sources did you select, and why?

As you work on your presentation and slides, how does that process help you to think differently about the actual writing of the proposal? Could/should you make any changes or additions to the written part of this project?

  • What challenges have you faced (or do you expect to face) as you combine, revise, and edit all the material for the proposal?
  • In what ways has your writing changed this quarter?

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