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sophomore year:
During my sophomore year of college, I took three honors courses. Here's a little bit of information on them and the kind of coursework required of us.
transcendental poetry
This class is the reason I am who I am today, and I can easily say that it has been my favorite out of all the courses I've taken. In it, we read the Romantic Poets: Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and the American transcendentalists, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. If there was any one movement in history I feel most tethered to, it's the Transcendentalist movement of the early and mid-1800s. Being able to read these different poets taught me a lot about myself and how I view the world--which definitely shifted after this course. To the left is my final project. Instead of uploading the paper I wrote, I am uploading the presentation that went along with it. This is the powerpoint I used when I presented at the OTC Honors Conference in 2018. It focuses on the Transcendentalist period and the ways it has (and still is) affecting music.
intro to sociology
Intro to Sociology taught me a lot of things. Throughout this course, we learned about a variety of cultures, took a more in-depth look at social class structure, and gained a better understanding of the foundations of sociology. This class required us to each volunteer with an organization of our choosing for at least 30 hours. I chose to volunteer with the Fair Grove branch of the Springfield Public Library. In addition to volunteering, we were each assigned a research paper that would discuss the financial differences between Springfield, MO and another city of our choosing. This project required that we address the different levels of poverty in each city and combine that with our findings on what it means to budget there. To the right is my paper, which compared the budgeting levels between Springfield, MO and Boston, MA.
Beginnings of world lit
This honors class was one of the most fun and interesting classes I took through the OTC honors program. In it, our class read through many important pieces of literature from around the world. Some of these included: Oedipus, Gilgamesh, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao Te Ching, and excerpts from Don Quixote. None of these were things that I had previously been interested in reading, but this class brought them to life and helped me learn so much about the world and its literature. I think this class may be what sparked my love of classics. To the left is the term paper I wrote for the final project in the class. I chose to write about Michel Montaigne (whom we read in class) and compared his thinking to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favorite transcendentalists. To this day, this is probably my favorite term paper that I've ever written.
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