The Second Year Advocacy Forum gave me a better sense of how to advocate for change while inspiring me to advocate for change as well. During this forum, I read three projects, one was about NASA funding and increasing awareness of its importance, another was about voter registration reform and voter turnout, and the last was about the workload of college students and its effects. All of these projects used factual details to bolster their argument which in turn helped convince me of the points they were making, while some also inspired me.
In the project about the workload of college students, I found these factual details especially helpful in this project since there were quite a few statistics about how different aspects of college and life affect students’ gpa and mental health. The author of this project specifically referenced Ohio State and what they are doing to help their students with their stresses, which I found to be interesting since it directly relates to me and could be helpful to me at some point. The project about NASA funding included a lot of statistics as well and went into detail about how NASA affects the economy and US markets which I found to be more relatable and convincing since it dealt with a topic that personally affects me.
Another project I looked at was on voter registration reform and it went into great detail about the different systems of voter registration and how effective they have been on increasing registration rates, which is the biggest barrier to voting. This kind of information particularly interests me because one of the topics I am passionate about is voting and getting others to vote. One of the big points in this article that I found inspiring was that people need to vote to cause any sort of change in society. As a whole, this project was inspiring to me and gave me a few ideas for my own advocacy project that I will complete next year.