Capstone Essay
Years of academic pursuit at the University of Washington Bothell were an enlightening and constructive experience for my personal development. As an IAS program student, I was fortunate enough to embrace many opportunities and challenges that allowed me to become not only a consumer but also a producer of interdisciplinary knowledge in the field of Community Psychology. Looking back at the academic accomplishments such as class assignments and projects on my academic path, they represent my development in education experience and the preparation for my future workplace. I decided to pick some of my academic accomplishments to explain and display the core learning objectives I have gained in the IAS program in the hope of summarizing and reflecting on my biggest take-aways as a student and helping me navigate employment in my future career path.
Being an IAS student, one of my major learning objectives is to develop advanced writing and communication abilities by learning to communicate and express the purposes effectively to diverse audiences, using a wide range of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to develop ideas and support claims in ways that best serve my academic needs. Besides academic performance, I have also gained deeper insight into how writing and communication abilities are about being professional, productive, and building relationships. During these years, I was given valuable chances to reflect, in the form of writing, on my own intellectual journey. The first assignment I want to point out is the Critical Reflection Journal from my BIS255 Critical Diversity Studies class instructed by Professor Jason H. Morse, in which I was tasked to keep a critical reflection journal that involves reflecting on the course readings that interest me the most by answering particular question throughout the quarter. This “Reflective practices” not only frames my engagement with the conceptual essays and graphic texts we read in the class in some way but also is an important way to come to an understating of new ideas and my own “take away” on them in order to develop resiliency, confidence, self-efficacy, self-worth, persistence and growth mindset. I can’t really express enough the importance of reflection is to my learning process, in fact, I would argue there is no learning without reflection. Another assignment I want to discuss is the Persuasive Essay from my BIS364 Realities and Representations of Adolescent Development class instructed by Professor Wadiya A. Udell, in which I was tasked to write a persuasive essay in the form of a letter explaining why a local school board who is considering changing their sexual health curriculum should consider watching the film "The Education of Shelby Knox" to help inform their decision. In this letter, by comparing abstinent sex education and comprehensive sex education, I have explained what the board could learn about adolescent sexuality from reading up on adolescent sexuality. To avoid the idea that people should automatically believe that personal opinions are enough to drive policy, I have also integrated research findings to support aspects of the film and my assertions in this letter.
Being a Community Psychology student, I was expected to step out of my comfort zone, discover, and develop my critical and creative thinking abilities by integrating knowledge across disciplines and contexts in ways that respect different approaches to understanding human development and well-being. To me, critical and creative thinking abilities refer to the complementary skills that we use in different stages such as understanding, applying, analyzing, and creating when we trying to solve a problem and/or form a judgment not only in school but also in our daily life. One of my assignments that I believe is the perfect representation of me as a creative and critical thinker in academics is the Psychology in Context Paper from my BIS225 Social Psychology class taught by Professor Janelle M. Silva. For this assignment, I was tasked to creatively and critically apply class materials into social contexts. This paper embodies my own critical thinking on being able to locate and summarize current news from reliable sources and then apply and connect concepts in social psychology to explain what is going on. I chose to focus on the global practice of social distance due to the outbreak of the COVID pandemic which has boosted the development of online social media unsurprisingly, and the chance of social media users being exposed to misinformation (including but not limited to conspiracy theories, clickbait, hyper-partisan content, pseudoscience and even fabricated “fake news” reports) has sharply increased more than ever. I have critically examined how social psychology concepts such as selective attention and confirmation bias contribute to the vulnerability of the public susceptible to misinformation. Completing this paper has helped me understand more that thinking critically requires us to clearly and logically consider information that is presented to us, whereas thinking creatively helps us to generate new and novel ideas.
As an IAS student majoring in Community Psychology, another core learning objective from my academic path that I would like to discuss is collaboration and shared leadership abilities. By practicing and learning to work with my classmates from diverse backgrounds, I have gained different perceptions of identifying dimensions of a project, generating and refining ideas, and pursuing specific goals without losing a sense as a whole. Out of all my collaborative experiences at UW Bothell, there are two artifacts of mine that can represent the transformation of me from an independent worker to a collaborative worker and give me the confidence to work efficiently in my future workplace. The first piece was a group paper from my BIS380 Bioethics class instructed by Professor Laura Harkewicz, in which me and my group members were tasked to discuss and evaluate different versions of the ethical dilemma’s scenario, consider and apply the four primary ethical principles (justice, beneficence, respect for autonomy/persons, non-maleficence), then generate group decision on solving such dilemmas. During our group working process, we were not only able to keep track of the benefits and limitations of each theory, principle, or text considered, but also keep track of the confusion and conflicts among group members involved in our discussion. The second artifact was the Research Cluster Paper from my BIS313 Issues in Media Study class that instructed by Professor Ron Krabill. For this assignment, me and my group members were tasked to explore a specific human rights issue (Death Penalty) and discuss the public contestation around it in more detail, and devise at least one possible intervention, then facilitate the knowledge we have gained on the topic to the rest of class through group presentation at the end of the quarter. In this assignment, we all had the chance to rotate the role from the group speaker to the group navigator both during and outside of class, to collect and analyze everyone’s ideas for the final research cluster paper and group presentation, and to make sure every group member was satisfied with our group activities. Through valuable opportunities like these, I have learned that collaboration and shared leadership implies that influences can arise from any direction in a group. This means that anyone in a group has the potential to be the leader at least from a certain perspective and to some extent.
The experience at the University of Washington Bothell not only has contributed to my development in academic skills and insights but also has prepared the attitude and knowledge for me to continue my future life journey. Besides these three years have met my expectation in academic pursuits, moreover, what I have gained is far beyond my imagination which I believe is the beauty of academics. My journey at UW Bothell as a student taught me that learning is more than a University experience but a lifetime process. As I look ahead, I see myself both consciously and subconsciously applying the take-aways from the school of IAS and the field of psychology and striving to make contributions to solving the problems our society is facing today with a better version of myself.