Sunday, January 24, 2010
Research Blog #1: Initial Topic Idea
As I was looking through all of the different topics for the 201 course, this one with the title of "College!" had definitely caught my attention. I was debating between a couple of the courses but for some reason this one just stood out, besides for the fact that it was the only topic ending with an exclamation point. Anyway, I decided to sign up for it because I feel that by being in college myself, it makes it that much easier to relate to this topic. However, going into the first day of class I honestly had no idea what to expect. I knew we would be writing a research paper about college but just within that itself there are so many different topics that it makes it difficult to just pick one thing to write a research paper on. As we discussed the course in class along with some possible research topics, I found one topic that was mentioned to be very interesting. The balance between a good social life and a good academic life. I'm not exactly sure how I would go about writing a paper on this but I think it would be cool to research it. I myself am finding it difficult to do really well and keep up with all of my classes while also spending enough time experiencing the college life, and I think a good amount of college students are in the same position as me in this particular situation. Whether it is your friends or classmates pressuring you to go out at nights or on weekends to hangout with them, or your parents at home pressuring you to do really well in your classes, or even just your own views on college and how you feel you should spend your time there, I feel that many students are stuck in a rut trying to deal with both of the two worlds.
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Funny, you are one of several students interested in the topic of "balancing student life and academics" and expressing it in this form. But I actually had presented it as "the disconnect between 'college life' and academics" -- meaning that "the two cultures" seem antagonistic to each other. Like most students, maybe, you see this as simply the need to "balance" the two toward some imagined equilibrium. From a professor's perspective, however, there is no possible equilibrium: your future (and the good of society perhaps) depends on success in academics, and "student life" is openly antagonistic to that success -- perhaps because, as Rebekah Nathan suggests, there is a desire on the part of other students to keep you from succeeding so that things are kept in "balance" or "equilibrium" for them. In other words, they don't want to work so hard and don't want you to mess up the curve by doing well. If we want excellence in college performance, from a professor's perspective, we have to do something about the drag effect created by "student life."
ReplyDeleteHowever, I suppose you could approach this topic by using some ideas drawn from writings on "happiness" -- beginning with a book like "Stumbling on Happiness." I'll try to return to this topic in class discussion.