You’ll complete this assignment at the end of Week 6, October 23, 6:00 p.m. Central Standard (Minnesota) Time.
Introduction:
When your classes are complete and you head out for winter break, it’s all but certain that people in your life outside of Carleton will ask you, “how was your first term at college?” Often (though not always) this can be a difficult question to answer. First of all, it requires you to summarize a complex set of experiences that you’re still processing yourself into an answer that’s coherent to another person.
Furthermore, it requires you to understand that person’s expectations well enough to connect with them: What is their understanding or expectation of what college life is like for you? What details of your experience will allow you to address those expectations, while still saying something truthful about your college experience?
Conversations like this can be frustrating, but they can be valuable too. Rethinking your own experiences in a way that allows you to articulate them to someone else can help you process them and decide how they’re meaningful to you. This assignment is designed to get you started on that thought process.
Assignment:
Imagine that the break has begun, and you’re talking to a real, specific person (or group of people) who has just asked you, “how was your first term in college?”
This imagined audience should be someone who isn’t another Carleton student and who doesn’t already know the details of your college life in any significant way. Ideally, it should be someone who either has no particular impression of your day-to-day experiences in college or someone who has an actively incorrect impression of those experiences. This doesn’t need to be someone with whom you’d be willing to discuss every aspect of your college life, but it should be someone who you wouldn’t feel inclined to actively deceive, either.
Keeping the audience you identified in mind, respond to the following items, using as many words as you need to fully express your response to each item:
1) Who is your imagined audience, and what is your relationship with them?
Insert your text here…
2) When your audience asks you how your first term in college went, what kinds of details or experiences do you think they’ll be expecting to hear about?
Insert your text here…
3) How, overall, would you describe your term to this audience? What aspects of your college experience would you focus on, and what details might you provide to help them understand? You can address this by describing your conversation with your audience in first person (e.g. “In describing my first term to my Uncle Raul, I would focus on…”) or, if you prefer, you can actually write your description in second person, as though you were actually speaking to this audience (e.g. “Well, Uncle Raul, my first term was really challenging because…”).
Insert your text here…
4) How does the description you would give to your audience correspond to your understanding of your first term? If they’re different, why do you think this is the case?
Insert your text here…
Learning Assist:
Don’t forget to complete your Learning Assist for this week.
