American Government & Politics • Mary Carver • Fall 2017
This was, by far, my favorite class of the fall semester! This was the most challenging and note-intensive course, but Dr. Carver’s passion and sense of humor made the class so interesting that I briefly considered minoring in political science. My hand often hurt from all the note-taking by the end of each fifty-minute class, but I always left feeling like I had acquired a wealth of new information and a renewed interest in our nation’s government. Most of the class surrounded note-taking, but we did have one paper. We analyzed multiple Federalist Papers, so it should come as no surprise that our paper surrounded one of them. We were asked to look at the argument in James Madison’s Federalist 39 and state whether or not we agreed with it. Relating a document written hundreds of years ago to modern times was a very informative and interesting task that I greatly enjoyed exploring. This paper encouraged me to further build on basic arguments I may have otherwise only scratched the surface.