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?
Make notes, highlight, annotate… do what you need to do in order to understand the prompt and what it is asking of you.
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.)
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?
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 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?
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?