Artifact 4

I chose Political Science 1300 – Global Politics, a class that I took during the Autumn 2015 semester, as my fourth artifact. This course was an introduction to the study of international relations, and helped me to develop the analytical skills necessary for debating real world problems relating to global politics. It was taught by Dr. Jennifer Mitzen, an Associate Professor from the Department of Political Science.

This course taught me about the politics of war, economic development, and humanitarian intervention on a global scale, three topics that I am interested in but previously did not have much knowledge about. I also learned about many of the careers related to this field, such as the United Nations and other non-governmental organizations, that I would be interested in working with in the future.

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Artifact 3

For my third artifact, I chose Religious Studies 2102.02 – Comparative Sacred Texts, a class that I took during the Spring 2016 semester. I originally took this class to fulfill a GE requirement, but I ended up enjoying it more than I anticipated. This course was taught by Dr. Isaac Weiner, an Assistant Professor from the Department of Comparative Studies.

This course covered the sacred texts of a variety of religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. As a class, we also considered a number of contemporary debates surrounding these religions. Additionally, we were required to visit religious sites in central Ohio outside of class, so I chose to visit the OSU Hillel and the Wat Buddha Samakidham Temple. This class taught me much about religions all over the world and the cultures of the people that follow them.Screen Shot 2016-05-04 at 7.53.35 PM

Artifact 2

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This year, I took English 1110.02. For this class, we needed to complete an analytical research paper throughout the course of the semester. The theme of this paper was fear, and it needed to be seven to eight pages in length. My paper was titled “Fear and Bigotry in United States History,” and examined different types and bigotry in our country’s history and explained how they all could be traced back to the emotion of fear.

The three forms of bigotry that I focused on were racism, sexism, and Islamophobia. For each of these, I researched the psychological reasons behind why people held these intolerances against others and found that fear was a common variable. I then gave a brief summary of each one in the United States, followed by a connection to their prevalence today.

Artifact 1

UN Healthcare Project

My first artifact is my UN Millennium Development Goals Presentation that I completed in my International Affairs Scholars Seminar.  For this assignment, four of my classmates and I were assigned to one of eight UN Development Goals to research, write a paper about, and give a presentation on. We were also asked to pick a region of the world that is especially affected by our Goal to focus on. My group was assigned to the fifth Millennium Goal,  to improve maternal health, and the region we chose to study was India. While completing this project as a group, my portion was to answer what our millennium goal is and why it is important.

While working on this project, I gained an insight to the world around me that I did not previously have. One of the reasons for this is because I am a male and maternal health does not really affect my life. Secondly, I am fortunate enough to live in the United States, where we do not have many issues in regards to maternal health as much as countries on the other side of the world. However, from doing my research for this project, I was able to learn about the lack of maternal healthcare in other parts of the world, and how it significantly affects many people. I now realize that maternal health really does need to be improved, and that the United Nations was right by including it as one of their eight Millennium Goals.