Advanced Writing Seminar

Goal 13

English 400 is typically a class that is taken as a senior because it is supposed to prepare you for life after you graduate, but I took it as a Junior. I believe that it did prepare me a little bit, but not as much as I wanted it to. We learned how to write resumes and cover letters which were important, but we also learned how to write memos and progress reports and that won’t really benefit me because I am a chemistry major. There was a topic of the class and it was water. We read two books during the semester: one was a nonfiction book about the water crisis and the other was a fictional book about what could happen in the world if the water crisis gets a lot worse. The fiction book was a lot easier to read because I found it more interesting, but the nonfiction book gave little snippets of water problems around the world. I did not like this book as much because there were no sources at all. It was hard to get into, but some of the stories were about India and that interested me because I knew I was going to India to study abroad the winter after this class. It gave me insight to what I should expect when I would be there. We had free range to choose a final project related to any problem we wanted to try and help/fix. I wanted to inform individuals about common mental illnesses of college students.

https://joshuawalker99.wixsite.com/mentalhealthawarenes

This artifact is my website that I made for my final project. On it I defined three general categories of mental illnesses, what to do if friends or family are experiencing them, and resources that can help. I believe that websites like these should be utilized by everyone to be informed and know what to do if they have a mental disorder or if someone they love and care about has a mental disorder. This subject hits close to home for me because I have friends and family that fight battles with mental disorders everyday and I wanted to be able to do something about it. I was not an expert in this topic, but I did my research and cited a lot of sources to be able to put this website together. Not only did it help me become more informed on the topic, it gave me the skill to create a website and it gave me a better ability to portray information that I have learned to a general audience. This was my favorite part of this class and it may not have to do with my career goals, but you always need to take care of yourself so this website will always be relevant if I need it.