Presentations 4/25

The topic for the presentations on 4/25 was "Psychological and Cognitive Sciences". The three presentations covered using music as a tool for leaning, the use of equine-facilitated psychotherapy (EFP), and the genetics of suicide. All three of the presentations were done very well and had lots of good information. Before Lyndsey's presentation on EFP I had never known it was even a form of treatment. It makes sense though, I know animal therapy with dogs and cats is quite popular especially with the elderly, but I never thought a horse would be all that great a comfort animal. I've also never really been around horses much, and am quite wary of them. I was even more surprised to find out there was an EFP clinic in Bentonville. Matthew explained the difficulties of determining the role of genetics in suicide. Because the event is so devastating, the environmental factors are overwhelming. It's also surprising to remember actually how little we know about brain functioning, and that really we are in the infant stage of understanding how the brain works at all. Nick explained how music can be used as a tool for learning, and in fact we could all sing the ABC song even after first learning it 15-plus-years ago. I feel that music could be integrated into all sorts of areas in the academic curriculum. I remember when we had a substitute teacher in the 4th grade who brought his guitar and let us write songs for what we were doing in class in either English or mathematics. To this day he was the coolest sub I've had for a class. Not only did the music help make things creative and interesting, guitars are also just plain cool, and really helped engage a bunch of rambunctious fourth graders. I definitely think we need to bring more music into schools, as a musician myself, I find that I can wrap my head around more abstract concepts and just "think out of the box" more, so to speak.

Changes in writing process blog post

I don't feel that my writing has changed in any particularly profound ways throughout the semester, however my organization is progressively getting better. In the beginning of the semester I had a hard time setting up an argument. After a couple papers I was finally able to get the idea down for a strong topic sentence, followed by evidence, and then a discussion of how that evidence supports my argument. Simply getting my argument into that model improved my papers significantly.

By doing different types of research over different areas of our project I've gotten a lot better at finding the articles I need in the library databases. The trick I learned was to do multiple searches with subtle keyboard changes. For example I would do a search on "commercial spaceflight", another on "private spaceflight", "private sector, space", "spaceflight companies", so on and so forth. I still have a problem keeping my paper under some sort of umbrella topic. Once I start doing research, I tend to get really distracted by learning new things and forget what I'm wanting to talk about specifically. By the time I get to the end of my paper I have to go back and change my thesis to something more appropriately related to the sources I found.

I still am having trouble starting my papers, but my strategy seems to be working out well enough. I spend a few days reading over article, getting a sort of mental grid of how each topic relates to one another, then just start writing the body paragraphs. I like to make a list of topic sentences in my Word document then go through my sources and see what I can back up and have enough material to discuss. Often there will be a couple topic sentences that seem great, but are too distant to the "umbrella topic", and could potentially be topics for other papers.

I've also grown to really value the input from other people reading my papers. Peer review always helps me make sure I keep a forward enough paper so my reader knows what I'm talking about, and also get to understand my more common grammar/structure mistakes. I was never big into writing papers for school, but now I've finally learned the formula for academic writing more-or-less, so I feel a lot more comfortable and feel that I've started to find my voice in writing.