Marygrove Blog

The Nancy A. McDonough Geschke Writing Center: Advancing the Liberal Arts at Marygrove One Student at a Time

At Marygrove, we’ve always subscribed to the belief that positive change requires a diverse set of perspectives all working together towards a common goal. Our world, both locally and globally, is complex—and we’re humble enough to know that we can only make sense of it when we view it through more than one lens.

In 1997, novelist George Dawes Green started The Moth, an evening of spontaneous storytelling, with the hope that it might recreate, or at least mimic, the summer evenings he’d spent with friends on his Georgia porch; there they would sip whiskey and trade stories late until the evening while moths beat themselves against the lights.

Trying to manage your life as a full-time student isn’t easy—especially when you couple academic life with being a parent and working. If you would, though, take a few minutes and consider a few of our suggestions for managing your college career with grace and poise. They may pay off in the long run.

Google “Things to do in Detroit”—you’ll get the usual suspects: The DIA, The Science Center, The Henry, The North American International Auto Show, The Motown Museum. These staples are certainly noteworthy, but you’ve already seen them. Now what? Give five of these lesser-known city gems a shot. If you’re at Marygrove College, you can get to all of them in 10 minutes.

Very soon it’s going to happen: The Research Paper. “Writing Across the Curriculum” has become the mantra of most colleges and universities, which means that you are going to be writing a research paper in most of your classes—yep, even in your math, science and dance courses.

You may be new to the process, but don’t let inexperience create an unnecessary amount of anxiety. You’re purusing higher education to become a scholar, right? Exactly. So cut yourself some slack. If you knew everything already, there’d be no reason for you to be here.

It’s early in the semester and you have plenty of time and resources (your peers, professors and FREE writing tutors) to walk you through the process. And speaking of resources, here are what I consider to be five indispensable tips for writing a research paper.

What does student engagement look like?
A teacher located center stage? Tidy rows of silent, wide-eyed pupils? Imagine the exact opposite of this and you’d get professor Andrew Martin’s classroom. Here’s how a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes his evolutionary-biology class at the Universtiy of Colorado:

It is commonly known that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) respond enthusiastically to technology-infused classrooms. But what often stands between these children and effective computer-based, hands-on curriculum is clunky hardware. Although most of us use these navigational tools with relative ease, a keyboard or a mouse could literally mean the difference between a breakthrough and further isolation.

Somewhere in Asia, there was a restaurant owner. Despite the fact that he specialized in American cuisine and most of his clientele were English-speaking expatriates, he did not speak any English himself. Business was steady, but he still wanted to lure more international customers—so he decided to advertise the restaurant’s name in both Chinese and English. Since he didn’t speak English, he had no idea that the translation website he used to perform the translation was not working. And now his restaurant proudly boasts the name “Translate server error.” This is mistranslation at its finest and most comedic, but in places like Kenya, accurate translation is literally a matter of life and death.

Kurtis Swope, an associate professor at the US Naval Academy, describes unexpectedly running into a former student at a local restaurant. Their conversation is brief—mainly about the student’s courses that semester and his plans following graduation. Although the encounter is pleasant, it leaves Swope with an unsettling feeling: “After we talked, it occurred to me that I had heard him speak more during this short conversation than he had during the entire semester he took my course.”