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It may not seem like it yet . . . but Spring term and STEP project deadlines are just around the corner!  (Just what you wanted to hear the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I know.)

Still, I wanted to give you a brief preview of our activities in Spring . . . and some firm deadlines so you can mark your calendars.

I will meet with you all three times . . .

1. In small group sessions to discuss your working drafts of your STEP Signature Project Proposals. (These meetings will take place February 17-21 and February 24-28.) In early January, I’ll be sending out a Doodle poll for these meetings—and you will need to sign up for one of them.
2. One-on-one to review the final draft of your STEP Signature Project Proposal. Doodle poll to come in February. (Meetings will take place March 16-20 and 23-27.)
3. Our STEP cohort dinner—the location/date/time of which is TBD in April. I’ll do my best to find a date and time when everyone is available. Please keep an eye out in early January for a second Doodle poll!

NOTE: The STEP Signature Project is an optional component of STEP. You are considered to have completed the STEP program by actively participated in the autumn semester. But . . . for your information, please note the following:

JANUARY DEADLINES

• Watch for and respond to the two Doodle polls by Friday, January 17.

FEBRUARY DEADLINES

• First draft proposal deadline: February 15 (email to me at halasek.1@osu.edu)
• Watch for and respond to the Doodle poll for one-on-one meetings in March.

MARCH DEADLINES

• Final draft proposal deadline: March 6 (email to me at halasek.1@osu.edu)

APRIL 1 DEADLINE

• STEP Signature Project Proposals and Budgets to be uploaded to the STEP Dashboard

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A FIRM DEADLINE. If you do not upload a proposal and budget by April 1st, you are not eligible to receive the STEP Fellowship.

It’s always great to hear directly from professionals here at Ohio State about programs and resources available to undergraduate students. And our STEP cohort meeting was no exception as we were joined by Louise Yahiaoui (.1) from the Office of International Affairs and Alyssa Szu-Tu (.2) from the Office of ASC Career Services.

The information they passed along was invaluable! If you do have additional questions–please do contact them via their OSU email accounts.

Of particular interest–and perhaps a first next step for study abroad is to visit the OIA “Getting Started” page.

OIA Getting Started

You can also check out additional resources and information online:

https://oia.osu.edu/

And . . . Alyssa has given me permission to pass along a pdf file of her PowerPoint presentation:

Let’s Talk About Jobs and Internships

Finally, you can always access more information to help with your career planning at https://artsandsciences.osu.edu/career-success

Annie (our family’s English Bulldog) is a registered therapy dog–and joined us at our sessions on Oct. 24 and 31.

Although she typically comes to campus during final exams for the University Libraries’ Pause for Paws program, she made the trip this week to join our STEP cohort for brunch and a working session on selecting project categories and exploring specific programs and opportunities. When the Pause for Paws schedule is posted, I’ll be sure to update you!

Our session on November 7 was the first opportunity for students in our STEP cohort to brainstorm ideas around creating a personal statement. (Their task was not to compose a statement . . . not quite yet.)

As a writing teacher, I know that personal statements are one of the most challenging genres for any writer–undergraduate, graduate students, assistant professors composing teaching statements. They task is vexing. Nearly every element is an unknown: Who will be reading this? What are they looking for? Just what am I expected to tell them? Am I trying to persuade them? Inform them? Entertain them? (By the way, the answer to these last three questions, generally speaking, is “Yes! But . . . .”)

For a useful general resource on writing personal statements, check out the Purdue OWL site.

One particular page that might be of interest is “Top 10 Rules and Pitfalls.”

Many of our STEP cohort sessions early in the term were spent exploring (and recording in STEP journals) personal values, academic and professional goals, and experiences and individuals who had impacted their growth, development, and beliefs–and linking those to the STEP project categories. All of these elements–in various measure and to different effect–can inform and contribute to a successful personal statement.

As we discussed brainstorming toward a personal statement, I reminded students that different audiences and purposes will lead to different statements emphasizing different facets of their lives, interests, and skills. For example, a faculty member reviewing personal statements from students seeking to undertake research will likely be seeking different information (and be persuaded by different content) than a head of a non-profit organization looking for interns to serve as program coordinators at a summer outdoor adventure program.

I didn’t have a particularly nuanced way of trying to illustrate this to them, but I drew a series of overlapping circles, a kind of Venn diagram, on the board and labeled each (e.g., values, academic interests)–but then explained that (again, depending on the audience and purpose) one or more of the circles would likely be more important in a given statement. For that professor considering leading an undergraduate research project, academic interests and goals will likely be critically important, while the non-profit head will be interested in past experiences working with children, relevant outdoor skills, and commitment to public service and volunteerism.

During our Nov. 7 session, students spent about 30 minutes or so drafting responses to a series of questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What are your interests?
3. What are your personal values?
4. What are your personal goals?
5. What are your professional goals?
6. What are your academic interests?
7. What matters to you?
8. What does your future look like?
9. What matters to you?
10. What does your future look like?
11. Who do you aspire to be?
12. What/who has influenced your growth/development?

At the close of the session, I asked students to save their brainstorming and also leave me with a list of questions about or challenges they face when drafting personal statements.

cstw.osu.edu

I then passed these questions along to Dr. Chris Manion from the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing, who’ll join us at our November 14 session for a writing workshop on crafting personal statements.

Here are the students’ questions and challenges:

Questions:

1. Can I use “I” statements?
2. How personal do we get with personal statements?
3. Do we need an emotional appeal when writing personal statements?
4. How professional should this be?
5. If our personal, academic, and professional goals overlap, how should we go about outlining the statement?
6. How much about yourself are you supposed to include?
7. Should the focus be “all about me” or “here’s why I would get this exact internship”? (Should explicitly say things like “This internship aligns with my academic interests” or should it be more nuanced?)
8. What is relevant?
9. How general should I be? How specific?
10. How do I narrow down what is most important to include in my personal statement?
11. Are there any specific qualities that one should try to emphasize in the personal statement?
12. How do you format a personal statement?
13. How long should it be?

Challenges:

1. Finding a way to not make a personal statement sound cheesy will be difficult.
2. Finding a way to make the things I want to say genuine instead of just saying hem to try to get the internship, job, etc.
3. I’ve always struggled writing out who I am as a person and who I aspire to be b/c I am still unsure of what I want to do with my life.
4. It’s hard to find out what the committee that’s looking at these wants.

Composing personal statements is vexing, and hard work–but considering audience and purpose and continually returning to values, academic interests, and professional goals to tie them to a particular STEP project area will certainly reduce the challenge.

As an additional resource, please review the Writing Personal Statements for Graduate School document and webinar from our Nov. 14 session: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uwyly2mw4v4mx90/RRM2018_GradApplicationWebinar.mp4?dl=0

This morning (which happens to be a Sunday) begins for me as most do (and I’ve referred to this in an earlier post): I make coffee and sit down for a quick review of the international and national news (BBC, NPR, and ESPN–go Twins!).

I also typically check the digital updates from The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, two of the most recognized news sources of information in higher education. The dailies offer summaries of recent news in higher ed (e.g., debates about the impact of donor influence, the role of Big Data and AI, the recent admissions scandals, trends in business that impact undergraduate education, and job opportunities).  The publications also summarize recent research in higher education–particularly academic articles from the learning sciences, those areas of research that investigate whether, how, and to what degree particular approaches to teaching impact student learning.  In other words, these studies test whether particular instructions practices actually improve student learning.

Photo by Jo McCulty
The Ohio State University

One recent article cited a study on active learning by a research team at Harvard led by Louis Deslauriers in the Department of Physics. (Physicists, it turns out, are among the faculty most interested in studying the impact of classroom practices on student learning. Carl Weiman at Stanford is among them. And he’s a Nobel Prize recipient!)

The Delaueriers study, “Measuring Actual Learning Versus a Feeling of Learning in Response to Being Actively Engaged in the Classoom,” showed that students learned more in a physics class that employed active learning than in class using a lecture-based approach.

However, students perceived that they learned less in the active classroom.

Article Summary

The researchers attribute this dissonance to a couple of factors–including the feeling that because engaging in active learning takes more cognitive effort (you have to think about the doing of active learning while you’re doing it), it may seem that–because effort is going to the act of learning–that you have less capacity to “get” the content.

As I read the article, I was reminded of the work of Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, who  posited two forms of pedagogy: banking and problem-posing. In “The Banking Concept of Education,” Freire presents the two forms. The banking concept assumes that instructors “deposit” information into the minds of their students (much as we deposit money into a bank account). The problem-posing approach assumes not an inert bottle (mind) to be filled but a mind to be engaged in its own development. In fact, Freire argues that the “teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself [sic] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (5). It’s that same joint engagement in learning that informs STEP. The program is intended to engage all of us–students and faculty alike–in the processes of learning and consciousness raising.

So, I hope you don’t mind a bit of reflection on learning and teaching. What I’d like you to take away from this post are two things: (1) If you’re in a classroom that asks you to engage in active learning practices, (a) engage! and (b) know that you’re likely taking away greater understanding than you think you are, and (2) consider yourself a partner in your learning–share the heavy lifting!

MY INVITATION TO YOU: I want to begin this post by encouraging you to post responses with your “go-to” app–the one that you use most often or helps you through your day, whether it’s one that provides a reprieve from the daily grind and stress of classes or is just plain fun.

I’ll get us started.

When STEP started a few weeks ago and we were discussing our values, goals, “action” items, and expectations for our cohort, I found myself thinking about the apps that I turn to every so often–or even regularly–to help me navigate my days, keep me on task, or remind me to take a bit of time off.

HEADSPACE

Headspace

Until about two years ago, I had never thought in any sustained fashion about mindfulness–and I realize now the negative impact of not attending to mindfulness. I suffered from occasional but challenging insomnia that, on the face of it made me feel as though I was productive (“Three hours of work in before 7:00 am. Woo-hoo!!”) but often derailed me (“It’s only 3:30? My mind just shut off.”) I still use the free version and have notifications set up to give me recommendations for meditation and mindfulness practice, prompt me with reminders and show me “Mindful Moments,” daily messages that simply remind me to “Get Some Headspace.” (I have Headspace set to give me four notifications each day.)

RELAX MELODIES

Relax Melodies App

So, I mentioned in a previous post that in the past I sometimes had trouble sleeping. Actually, I now consider myself a great sleeper. I’m good at it and I love doing it. I don’t nap. (Something I’m now considering doing since reading a piece from Science Daily that reports napping once or twice weekly can decrease the chances of a heart attack. These are the kinds of things people over 60 think about a lot.) In any case, the free version of the Relax Melodies app offers me a whole slate of mix-and-match, customizable sounds that allows me to create an audio background soundtrack that I play on my iPhone. I prefer “Urban Rain” mixed with “Frogs” and “Peepers” and occasionally add in “Thunderstorm.” (As a plains midwesterner, thunderstorms have always been a source of comfort and relaxation to me.)

Although I don’t use the paid version of the Relax Melodies app, it also has  sleep, de-stress, recharge, dream, and reduce meditations that you can access for less than $2/month.

WALK FOR A DOG

Walk for a Dog

Finally, I use the Walk for a Dog app as a way to both get some exercise (with my two bulldogs, Annie and Georgie) and donate to one of my favorite organizations, Buckeye Bulldog Rescue. The app allows me to record the amount time, number of miles we walk, and impact.

Buckeye Bulldog Rescue

I rarely need motivation to get out and walk (although Annie and Georgie refuse to go out in the rain)–but it’s an added bonus when my walks with them can help a dog rescue organization.

So, I’ll end this post where I began–with an invitation to you to post responses with your “go-to” app–the one that you use most often or helps you through your day, whether it’s one that provides a reprieve from the daily grind and stress of classes or is just plain fun.

So, I am an NPR nerd–and, if asked, I’d respond that my local NPR station is 89.7, WOSU, but I also listen to 90.5, WCBE, on occasion. I typically listen each day on my way into and home from work and to NPR One when I work out at RPAC or run. I also check out NPR stories on my news feed every so often (after hitting the day’s news on the BBC and before checking baseball scores on ESPN or scrolling through Buzzfeed “14 Dog Posts from This Week that We Really Need Right Now” type stories). In other words, NPR is part of my daily ritual. And nearly every day I find something of value in their broadcasts. (You can find the daily and weekly schedule for WOSU here.)

NPR Life Kit How to Succeed at College

And that’s where I came across what I now know is an NPR podcast series, “How to Succeed at College.” Perfect for STEP! (You can find a directory online, as well.)

NPR Life Kit Sept. 4 Episode

It looks like the series only began this fall–with the first episode airing on August 30, 2019. The episodes run 20-25 minutes or so, and take up critical questions, like “How to Do Well (and be Happy!) in College”

NPR Life Kit Sept. 6 Episode

and “How to Get a Job after College.”  As NPR notes on the Life Kit page, the podcast is part of “NPR’s family of podcasts to help make life better — covering everything from exercise to raising kids to making friends.” You can  sign up for the newsletter or follow  @NPRLifeKit on Twitter. However you might access the series, I recommend it!

What else would I recommend from NPR?  Thank you for asking! Snap Judgment, Freakonomics, and Reveal. And, of course, “Only a Game,” which inconveniently airs live at 7:00 am on Saturdays . . . but you can also subscribe the podcast and queue it up during your next workout session at RPAC!

Welcome to our 2019 STEP Mentor Group site! 

I’ll be using this u.osu.edu site as an archive of our group activities and location for our weekly meeting updates. I will create pages for each week of the term–and those will appear in your left hand navigation bar.

Feel free to send me photos for the site as we go through the term! Here’s a first, from our Week 1 discussion on group expectations:

Group Expectations Post-it Note Chart