Below is writing I've done throughout my time at FIT. I have it ordered chronologically from most to least recent.
Creative Autobiography
During my fall semester of 2023 I took a creative writing class as my honors class. Our final for the class was a creative autobiography which included selecting a person in a creative domain and writing up an autobiography with secondary sources and an interview with the candidate as a primary source.
For this project I chose my drawing professor, Mark Kurdziel, because he's someone who has accomplished a lot in my intended creative domain and has encouraged me as an artist within his classroom. I conducted research on him, using his website as a source as well as several articles that had been written on him, his work, and exhibitions he's had. I found a multitude of information and used that to help me construct interview questions which I then asked him during his allotted office hours. This process felt like some of the most in depth research I've completed so far as a student here at FIT. Being able to not only collect secondary sources but interview my subject directly greatly aided in my engagement and motivation for this paper. I'm ultimately proud of how this piece of writing came out, although looking back I might have taken more time to organize the flow of the paper a bit better between the secondary information and the interview.
Lab Reports
Here are some pieces of writing done during my Social Experiments class in my spring semester of freshman year
This was a lab report written by a fellow classmate and I on the concept of "helping" in the scientific field. The background of the fascination of this came from an incident in 1964 Queens where a woman, Kitty Genovese, was brutally murdered outside of her apartment. The reason this tragedy attracted so much attention was because, out of the 39 people who witnessed/heard the crime occurring, only one person called the police. This coined the term "the bystander effect" and was a topic heavy looked into within the research field. In our classes case, we conducted an experiment based off of the appearance of the confederates (the people employed by the experimenters) and the type of request being made--something that had been looked into in a multitude of past lab reports. The findings, although not being statistically significant, showed that there seemed to be somewhat of a pattern between what the confederates were wearing and the type of help they were asking for. Overall, this was a really fun experiment to conduct and super interesting in looking at our own biases and scenarios in which we would help/not help.
This is my final lab report done in my social experiments course with me and two fellow classmates. This piece was on the "reward theory", which is this concept that the promise of reward impacts the motivations for people to do specific tasks. In total, this paper is 23 pages long and consists of 11 sources. My partners and I worked really hard on this project, from the concept for the experiment to the research, application, observation, and writing up of this series of tests and I'm honestly really proud of how it came out. We got interested in this topic because of how applicable it is in everyday life and we tested that by asking every participant to do something mildly personal for us--showing us the last photo on their camera roll--with four different rewards; $1, a sticker, a fist bump, and no reward (this was used as the baseline). We split up the experiment into four separate trials using one reward per trial. We thought it would be interesting to see how the type of reward influenced the motivation for people to do said experiment. We also looked at how different groups of people responded to the motivators; i.e. men v. women v. non-binary, ect. Overall, we didn't find anything too significant and weather did interfere with a few days of the study but it was really fascinating to conduct and we got into many interesting conversations with people about the experiment.
Below are some photos of my partners and I out on the field running the experiment:
Research Paper
This is some additional writing I did during Fall 2021 in my English 142 Honors class with Professor Sarah Blazer. All of these projects feed into each other and I was really happy with how they turned out.
This was an Annotated Bibliography I made on some sources I collected for my research paper (see below). At this point in the process I had picked the following topic, "How bilingualism can affect the lingual development of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder". I found 4 sources for the annotated bibliography that related to my topic and summarized them in a detailed way that would be the most helpful to reflect on while writing my research paper later on. Overall, I think the summaries of the sources were thorough and addressed not only the content of each source, but also the legitimacy of the information and the authority of the authors. The one thing I would adjust is the fact that I didn't break up my summaries into multiple paragraphs, which was reasonable for some of them but definitely not for most of them. I wrote it in one paragraph because the reference we were given of a previous students work only had one paragraph so most of the class actually ended up just writing a big blurb of text. In retrospect I should've just done what I initially thought was best anyway because some of my summaries are ridiculously long. Now I know for the future.
This was the research paper that I wrote based on the research that I did above in my Annotated Bibliography--although I did do a lot of additional research since I had such a scientific topic. I originally got interested in this topic because my mother works at a non-profit organization called Jawonio that serves people with physical and developmental disabilities. Since we had to do our topic on something regarding language and communication, I thought it would be interested to look into how learning multiple languages could have affects on people with Neurodevelopmental disabilities. However, when doing my research a lot of the studies I found specifically focused on children with Autism so I decided to narrow down my topic to just how bilingualism affects children with Autism. I was genuinely proud of how this paper turned out. I made a big outline--which I actually came to the studio to work on with a tutor--that helped me out immensely with properly structuring it. I definitely covered a lot of information and talked about a lot of scientific-heavy studies so I do feel like there are points of the paper that could've gotten a little confusing/unnecessary for my audience, the parents of children with Autism. Overall, I feel like the conclusion in this paper is also not the best. Even though I feel like I definitely reflect back on what is talked about in the paper and lay out the proper steps to take as a community to help children with Autism in their linguistic journeys, I still feel like it's missing something at the end but I'm not exactly sure what.
This is an advocacy letter I was supposed to write to a specific person. I ended up choosing to write to Mr.Benedetto and the members of the Standing Committee of Education of New York State to give children with autism access to second language classes in public schools across the state. I used personal experiences from my own public education experience as well as all the research previously done, but the information was organized in a much more compact format which forced me to simplify a lot. This actually ended up being a good limit because it actually helped me tailor the research to my audience in a more digestible manner. Unlike some of my other writing, I actually think that my conclusion is decent in this letter. It summarizes the letter and wraps up everything with a strong final sentence.
This was a summary project done at the end of my semester which was meant to reflect back on my progress throughout the semester and actually pick a section of one of my previous pieces and improve it. I ended up talking about useful things to think about while outlining and revising a project, including picking an audience, coming up with a general layout, organizing resources, making a reverse outline while proofreading, and making sure everything connects from one idea to another. I ended up choosing a paragraph from my research paper to edit that talked about a study from a source I found. I picked this section because I felt like it was a little bit too confusing for an audience that hadn't read through the source themself. I ended up simplifying some information and making sure it came to a clear statement at the end of the paragraph that summarized what the study showed since it wasn't clarified in the original paragraph I wrote. At the end of this project we had to discuss how the types of writing we learned in this class related to what career we were planning on going into. I want to be a forensic artist so I thought that learning a variety of different writing was the most useful for me, which I definitely got in this class.