Hello senior self! I hope you are excited for your senior year of college and are looking forward to graduation. Shannon, I hope that you have managed to make it through all of your classes and have made it above a 3.2 GPA in all the semesters you’ve had. In your clinical I want to make sure you have been following everything you learned in the classroom and are applying it to the best of your abilities. I hope you have become close with your nursing cohorts and the nursing staff. I know you will still be apart of Alpha Phi Omega, so I hope that you have participated in as many projects as you could to help your Longwood community. I think you will have lead many service projects and by now have gotten a wonderful little that you have passed down your passions too. I hope you are continuing to grow the Longwood community as well as the Honors College through other volunteer work. I am so excited to see where you have gone and what you have accomplished in your remaining time at Longwood!

This perspective was fulfilled by Honors 495: Special Topics: Love, Sex, and Friendship. This was my first philosophy class so it was tricky to understand the texts that I was reading because I had no practice in reading that kind of literature. However, I enjoyed reading the book Symposium by Plato and The Four Loves from C.S. Lewis. My favorite topic was friendship because it was eye opening to see how friendships are typically first formed and how to keep a successful friendship. Lewis’s book covers this with him saying that there must be a matrix of friendship that includes people doing similar activities. I believe that I will be able to build better relationships based on the information I learned in this class, as well as understand the relationships I currently have. For our final project we could either write a wedding toast about love, or a letter to a friend who is moving away and is afraid of making new friends. I chose the friendship path because it was similar circumstances to my best friend and I going to separate colleges. It used three of the texts we read in class and five outside articles that we had to find. It was a three page paper that used foot notes for the quotations.

url=”http://blogs.longwood.edu/smithsk2/files/2019/05/Philosophy-Research-Paper.docx”

The class that fulfilled this was Honors Citizen 110 called “Bodies and Citizens.” In this course we discussed different culture’s rights and how their bodies affected their citizen rights. The first topic was American Indians and how their bodies were judged by the settlers because they lived differently. We went on to discuss African Americans, how women in labor are treated at hospitals, the LGBTQ community, and sterilization. Throughout the class we read about these topics and annotated them and then came to class to have a seminar and get more background about the readings. We were also assigned one of the readings in order to do a three minute thesis presentation. At the end of the year instead of taking a final test we had a final project. The class had to pick a topic they were interested in a create a class, similar to the way this class was constructed. I chose to make my project around the topic of assisted suicide. I had to provide a “course description” for my class, then I found articles related to my topic. The journal articles I found were not discriminating against one belief or another; instead, they looked at both sides for the “class” to make their own opinions. After I finished creating the class, I presented an overview to my teacher as a presentation. This class was a great introduction to what college professors think in terms of work ethic and speaking infused classes.

url=”http://blogs.longwood.edu/smithsk2/files/2019/05/Shannon-Smith-final-project.pdf”

For this pillar it is required for nursing students to take math 171 which is Statistical Decision Making. The class first had a basic introduction as to what a statistic is, and the different types of graphs. Then the teacher got into different types of distributions, hypothesis tests, and confidence intervals. We learned how to find it by hand, in the calculator and under different circumstances with different variables missing. In class we went over power points so we could ask any question we had. Then there were homework questions to help us apply the knowledge we had learned. There were also three written paper assignments were we took data that was collected by a survey and again applied the knowledge learned in class. The papers were usually due right before the test, which was nice because I got to make sure I knew the material before I took the test. The first paper I wrote with a partner was about which political party students taking Math 171 identified with. From that data we took random samples to see which political party was most prominent. In the paper we had to put how to do things both by calculator and by hand which was great practice for the test.

url=”http://blogs.longwood.edu/smithsk2/files/2019/05/Statistics-Project-.docx”

For this pillar I took English 210 known as Neo Slave Narratives. This class was meant to discuss what life was like after slavery had been abolished. We read to learn about what it life was like during these times for the newly freed African Americans. Throughout the class we read Beloved which showed a mother’s regret over killing her baby for fear of its life through slavery and how that spirit has now come back to haunt her and the community. We also read The Underground Railroad, Zong!, and Feeding the Ghost. There were also articles we read that showed how at that period of time slaves were not even thought of as human beings and the difference between how women and men were treated. Towards the middle of the semester we were put into groups to select an article and then do a twenty minute presentation on. We presented on Spiller’s Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. This was written more towards the time during slavery and gives powerful images and explanations of how they were treated on slave boats or on the plantations. My favorite reading was the first two biography’s of Douglass and Jacob to introduce the class into what slavery was like. After we read the two books we had to write a four page comparative analysis on them. It was interesting because the reader can see a man and woman’s point of view through slavery. This was a great assignment to introduce the class because it is important to have an understanding of slave literature in order to understand neo slave literature.

url=”http://blogs.longwood.edu/smithsk2/files/2019/05/Shannon-Smith-Comparative-Analysis.docx”

I took Spanish 111 to fulfill this pillar, I was placed into this class by the test I took during the intro freshman meeting. It was very difficult not having taken Spanish in a year and then going into a class where I and the teacher could only speak in Spanish. However, I did learn a lot from this class and if I did not understand anything had multiple resources: the textbook, the teacher’s office hours, or the other students. There were multiple group activities during the class that helped the class apply the grammar tools we were using. There was also a video project towards the end of the semester that helped the class learn about the Spanish culture. It had to be ten minutes long and could include a short video to help the students watching understand. The project was an interesting way to help us understand different cultures and learn how to work with a team.

url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh6gJCDt2Ok&feature=youtu.be”

The class I took to fulfill this pillar was EDUC 245 otherwise known as Human Growth (Social, Political, and Economic). This course was offered as honors and non honors; however I took it as an honors. Throughout the class we discussed how children grow up in different cultures and how growth of a child could be stunted. We also talked about behaviors of different development ages, from early childhood to adolescence. The class consisted of tests and a project that was titled “Three Ages.” This project was a great way to apply the knowledge we had gathered in class. I got to interview three different people that fell into the early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. From there I wrote a ten page paper on my finding of their behaviors and growth and then presented my findings to the class. This class is a requirement for all nursing students; however, it was very interesting to see how the way you grow up can affect the person you become, whether it is culturally or their family is more complex. This course was great if you want to go into pediatric or family practice nursing because it teaches you how understand that not everyone was raised the same.

url=”http://blogs.longwood.edu/smithsk2/files/2019/05/Three-Ages-Project-2.doc”