Portfolio Introduction

(Senior Portfolio)

 

Choosing to study English was not innate. Before college, it felt like a purist I deeply wanted but one that I couldn’t justify. Once I changed my mind at 18, I realized previously refusing to study English was based out of fear and uncertainty. I was afraid of academically learning something for which I actually cared about being good. Now nearing the end of my academic career, my courses of study have followed a similar theme. The greatest experience I’ve endured while studying literature and writing is continuously confronting skills I lack that I’ve otherwise been able to ignore, and in building a culmination of my undergraduate work, I’ve become first accepting and then proud that everything I have to offer is not perfect and good. This is a display of my growth, of inability that I’ve proven committed to facing and allowing myself to learn. My academic portfolio is a display of adhering to the university’s learning outcomes that have prepared me with both literary and critical thinking skill, as well as it demonstrates my growth as a student, thinker, and writer.

Within my academic career at the University of South Florida, I’ve taken several literature and writing courses with many influential professors. During the Intro to the English Major, my professor introduced is to rhetoric, and the rest of the course followed through a layout that read interesting, diverse essays and inclined us, as a class, to communicate in conversation and peer review throughout our own written responses. The Intro class was important to me because it speed-fired many different writers with completely different experiences and ideas, but they all somehow either referenced or built atop one another. I’ve taken Professional, Expository, and Creative writing, all that have taught me specific skills in writing and communicating, each course challenging me to interact with the world in different ways. In my literature courses, I personally interacted with older texts that displayed culture and history during times I didn’t exist, and I learned how to critique and analyze acclaimed texts. 

In Senior Portfolio, as my academic career is coming to a close, I was given a platform to culminate these skills and ideas I’ve collected throughout my time so far in college. The first feature our class experienced was civic engagement, where we were gifted the opportunity to actually interact with students in Mexico. I posed questions about another culture that I don’t experience firsthand. These questions weren’t aimless, as I actually emailed and interacted with the people for which they applied. I also wrote about my own culture, granting me the opportunity to take a pause and analyze what that was, what it looks like to an outsider, and then to begin to communicate it clearly. 

Senior Portfolio also consisted of a Senior Capstone project, a final project that really provided any missed opportunity to synthesize what I’ve learned as an English Major. For this project, I collected and analyzed rigorous information from a variety of sources. I’ll continue to value actually taking the time to learn how to properly research. I gathered this information and created my own opinions ideas, and I learned how to articulate them towards a specific audience of academic and professional par. The Senior Capstone project is what I feel taught me the most, because it’s where I messed up the most. In this project, I was able to specifically pinpoint what I struggle with as a writer—honing in on a specified purpose and writing directed to its compatible audience instead of just getting overwhelmed and rambling. 

I still have a lot of growth to do, but at this point I do feel capable. I know it’s cliche to say this, but people don’t say the liberal arts “teach a person how to think,” so much that it sounds cliche to say for no reason. I feel confident in saying I have learned how to think, mainly because I’m proud of my portfolio that displays much I’ve even had to learn in one short undergraduate career. I still care about being good, but at least now I feel confident in the ability to learn how to get there, and that’s all I could have asked for from college.