Download assignment sheet from here: ellis-jason-eng1101-project2-2015-fall, or read below.

Project 2: Wiring Your Brain for the Future

Dr. Jason W. Ellis, New York City College of Technology, CUNY

Introduction

Use this project as an opportunity to learn more about your college major and future career. Using the City Tech College Catalog, the BLS’s Occupational Outlook Handbook, and other sources to explain your major and career to others in an essay of at least 1,250 words. You will have an opportunity to improve your work through the writing process before submitting it on our OpenLab site. You can strengthen your essay’s impact by manipulating the conventions of online publishing for your purposes and incorporating photos or videos of your own.

Project Topic

Your essay should argue why you have selected your college major and your career path. You could have selected any number of majors/careers, but you have your own reasons why you selected the one that you have. Help a reader understand more about what your major/career is and why you chose to follow that path. Also, consider this project an opportunity to learn more about your major and possible career paths. If you are an undecided major, you should choose one major and career that you would like to learn more about and write about it as the topic of your essay. Finally, make this project as useful to yourself as possible. Indulge your curiosity and imagine your future possibilities as a way of helping you better understand what those things are by developing an essay aimed at a broader audience that might include your peers, family, friends, and mentors.

Unity of Thought

Whatever topic you decide to write about, you should pick a single, unifying topic, and it should be something that you know a lot about without needing to do any additional research. All topics are open for to write about as long as it gives your audience a strong impression of you through your discussion of the topic. This means that everything that you write this topic in your essay must connect back to you and show (instead of telling) how it is a part of who you are as a person. Choosing this one topic to unite all of the separate paragraphs of your essay is called a unity of thought.

Developing Your Essay

We will break the essay up into the following components. Refer to the schedule to see when we will devote class time for drafting and peer review. Also, consider the paragraph numbers as recommendations only—you will have latitude in the number of paragraphs for your essay, but I wanted to give you one potential path for organizing your essay.

This is the recommended structure for your Project 2 essay. We will discuss how and why we will use this structure as we work through each part.

1. Introduction (1 paragraph)
   1. Introduce yourself as a student at City Tech who is reflecting on her or his major and thinking ahead to enter a specific career field.
   2. Thesis: This is the best career for me, because reason one, reason two, and reason three (or more); or I am excited about this major, because reason one, reason two, and reason three; or I chose this major, because reason one, reason two, and reason three.
   3. Roadmap—a variation on this sentence: In this essay, I will discuss the following topics: I will provide some background about the major, I will explain my reasons for choosing this major, and I will tell you more about how I plan to excel in my major and future career.
2. Background and Context (1 paragraph)
   1. Present your general research about your major and career choice. This paragraph gives your reader some background and contextual information.
   2. This paragraph should answer these kinds of questions: What do you learn in your major? What kinds of career options do you have after graduation in this major? What is the specific thing that you want to do with your education at City Tech? This paragraph should be supported with your research in the Course Catalog, City Tech website, and library research.
3. Supporting Evidence for Your Thesis (3 or more paragraphs)
   1. Each of these paragraphs should support your thesis statement in the first paragraph.
   2. Each paragraph should address only one of your reasons listed after “because” in your thesis statement.
   3. These paragraphs should be supported with your personal experience, readings, and library research.
4. Conclusion (1 paragraph)
   1. After briefly reminding your reader about what you have just written on your major/career and your reasons for choosing, turn the discussion outward. What are your plans to excel in your major? How do you plan to distinguish yourself in your career? What milestones have you set for yourself for the next 5, 10, etc. years? Imagine the possibilities. Be concrete and specific with your plans.
5. Works Cited
   1. Create a Works Cited list at the end of your essay that follows MLA formatting. Refer to the Purdue OWL Website (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/).
   2. Remember to use proper parenthetical citations of all sources in the body of your essay.
   3. Your essay’s argument must be supported by some kind of evidence beyond what you already know. As a minimal requirement, your essay must have three different cited sources of quoted and integrated material, two of which are the College Catalog and the BLS Website.

Progress and Process

It is absolutely essential to your success as a communicator to use the writing process to your advantage. We use the drafting, peer review, and revision process in an iterative fashion to develop your writing over time continuously but not necessarily in a linear fashion. Put another way, you should never consider your writing “done.” You can always return to any part of your writing and revise it in part or whole until its final due date.

Submitting Your Work on OpenLab

After you have completed your essay, you will copy-and-paste it in its entirety (including the Works Cited) into a new blog post on our OpenLab site. As a reminder, you create a new blog post by following these directions: 1) Login to OpenLab and navigate to our class’ site. 2) Mouse over the + sign on our site’s gray menu bar and click on “Post.” 3) You will now be on the Add New Post page. 4) Where it says, “Enter title here,” click and type your title (create your own informative title followed by your name, such as: Opportunities in the Professional and Technical Writing Program at City Tech by Jason Ellis). 5) In the large white box beneath the title, you can type or copy-and-paste the writing that you have done elsewhere. This is where you will create your Project 2 blog post. 6) Click “Publish” when you are ready for it to be read on OpenLab.

Schedule

Week	Day	Date	Announcements	Reading	Due
6	M	10/5	Student-led introduction to the reading. Introduce Project Two.   Lab: Brainstorm ideas and create outline for Project 2. Be prepared to discuss your brainstorming with your peer review group and give feedback to others on their ideas during our next class.	Medina, Brain Rules, Wiring.	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.   OpenLab: Type and post your reading summaries from previous week as comments to the appropriate blog posts on our OpenLab before arriving to class today.   Project One blog post due on our OpenLab site.
	W	10/7	Student-led introduction to the reading. Exercise on citing a book using MLA Professional Style.   Peer group activity: share your brainstorming and outline. Discuss your reasons for pursuing your major/career.    Begin writing your essay over the weekend. Focus on your introduction, which should be new writing and not copy-and-pasted from your previous project essay.	Medina, Brain Rules, Attention.	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.   Bring your typed brainstorming ideas and outline to class for peer group discussion. You will hand this in at the end of class after you have discussed your ideas with your peer review team.
7	M	10/12	No class.
	W	10/14	Student-led introduction to the reading. Explore the City Tech College Catalog and Bureau of Labor Statistics website.   Use remainder of class time for continued writing on Project 2.	Medina, Brain Rules, Memory.	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.   OpenLab: Type and post your reading summaries from previous week as comments to the appropriate blog posts on our OpenLab before arriving to class today.
8	M	10/19	Student-led introduction to the reading. Lab: Peer review at least 500 words of your Project 2 writing.   Class: Create Works Cited entries for the College Catalog and BLS web pages.	Medina, Brain Rules, Sensory Integration.	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.   OpenLab: Type and post your reading summaries from previous week as comments to the appropriate blog posts on our OpenLab before arriving to class today.   Bring three copies of at least 500 words of Project 2 writing.
	W	10/21	Library Orientation: Meet outside of the library entrance on the fourth floor of the Atrium.
9	M	10/26	Student-led introduction to the reading. Lab: Peer review at least 1000 words of Project 2 writing.    Class: Develop works cited entries for your article from the library’s databases.	Medina, Brain Rules, Vision. Medina, Brain Rules, Music.	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.   OpenLab: Type and post your reading summaries from previous week as comments to the appropriate blog posts on our OpenLab before arriving to class today.   Bring three copies of at least 1000 words of Project 2 writing.   Bring one print out of an article that you found through the library.
	W	10/28	Student-led introduction to the reading.	Medina, Brain Rules, Gender.	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.
10	M	11/2	Student-led introduction to the reading. Midterm grades available. Lab: Peer review your final draft of Project 2 essay with Works Cited list.	Medina, Brain Rules, Exploration.	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.   OpenLab: Type and post your reading summaries from previous week as comments to the appropriate blog posts on our OpenLab before arriving to class today.   Bring three copies of Project 2 final draft with Works Cited list.
	W	11/4	Student-led introduction to the reading. Introduce Project Three.	Carlson, “Nicholas Carr on the ‘Superficial’ Webby Mind,” http://goo.gl/VqyHVm Carr, “A writer of books, essays, and ephemera,” http://www.nicholascarr.com	Beginning of class writing: summary of reading.     Project Two blog post due on our OpenLab site.