HONS: The American Presidency – Dr. William Harbour
This was the first class I took that only met once a week, so I did find myself having to make some major adjustments starting in the first ten minutes of class.
I had a few issues keeping up with the class and lectures, which went pretty quickly. After the first week, I found myself taking notes on my computer because I was never able to write everything down he was saying and I did not enjoy going through a two and a half hour recording to catch up on sporadic points.
This, unfortunately, did not help with retaining the information, which did reflect on my tests. While the rest of the class had weekly essays to help with balancing that grade, I had a bit of a different assignment.
This was also the first split section class I had, so I was a little taken back at the options for our honors credit: either complete the weekly essays and also complete a 20-minute presentation on a list of topics, or opt out of the essays and complete a 20-page research paper on the same list of topics. As someone who does not like to present by herself, I opted for the research paper. This proved to be a challenge the closer I got to the end of the semester.
I did enjoy the class and Dr. Harbour’s enthusiasm for the topics, although I was bummed that my semester was one of the only semesters that actually missed out on having President Reveley teach the class due to his COVID taskforce meeting during the time of the class.
My artifact is the research paper, which I completed on Nixon and the Watergate Scandal. It was an interesting topic of my life for about three and a half weeks, so it even helped spark conversations with people who either lived through it or also had to research it, including my Chick-fil-A manager who asked about my progress on it every time I worked once I came home for break before exams. I learned more about Nixon than I ever thought I would, but it also helped with the experience of writing research papers and writing for a long amount of pages.