For this assignment, reflect on your life as a thinker and learner. Throughout this course you will be representing your own view points and those of your discipline. This essay is an opportunity for you to reflect on the events and circumstances that brought you to choose your major/discipline/career and to help others understand why you find your discipline a compelling framework for understanding the world.
It’s not possible for you to sum up your life in 2-3 pages. Therefore, you must select what is most important for your ultimate aim—and for the purposes of this assignment, your aim is to tell a story with a particular message. The message you want to tell is that you have had a life that inclines you toward a certain disciplinary view of the world. Accordingly, you need to include the following:
Why you chose your area(s) of study
The key events, situations, and influences that lead to your disciplinary/career interests
What is it exactly that interests you about your discipline/career (be sure to be as specific as possible and include specific concepts, topics, methods, or perspectives of interest)
Your values, skills, and strengths (and if relevant, weaknesses)
What disciplinary problems you are interested in
How you plan to use your disciplinary knowledge and skills in your future, especially in your future career plans or goals
This will require you to “dig deep”. Be brutally honest with yourself. Expressing weaknesses will not be held against you. Nor is there a need to tell your deepest darkest secrets. Our course reading tells us that the best leaders know their strengths and weaknesses, and know how to surround themselves with people who supplement or compliment them in some way. Your goal is to help other people understand what disciplinary perspectives guide the way you make sense of the world and how you came to adopt those perspectives.
Here are some additional rule-of-thumb guidelines.
Assume a general reader who does not know you personally
Do not dwell on the negative. If you find yourself wanting to discuss some major negative event, such as an accident or illness, try to emphasize what you learned from the experience rather than the disappointments or shortcomings it may have caused
How you structure this intellectual autobiography is up to you. There is no one right way to go about it. You might write it as a personal narrative. You might write it as a reflection on your goals in your profession or more broadly in your life. You might write in first person (so, yes, you can use “I” in this paper!) You might write it in third person, as if you’re profiling someone else. The truly adventurous among you may find a way to make it work in second person. You may decide to write in one smooth linear narrative, in a chronological but fragmented style, or in a way that jumps around in time and space. Have fun with it!
(Much of the phrasing and structure of this assignment has been taken verbatim from Chapter Five of Tanya Augsburg’s Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies)
