For me, one of the most valuable aspects of this course has been taking big, sometimes amorphous concepts and propositions and breaking them down into smaller, more manageable parts.

I mean this about assignments like the literature review and this week’s dissertation discussion, in which we’ve examined the parts of a whole and how they fit together, block by block.

But I also mean it about things like the “Research Interests” paper. I thought I knew what I was interested in researching, and I thought I could articulate that interest. But prior to the assignment, I never had to. The exercise of writing my interests down — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph — was really clarifying. I didn’t expect to have trouble with the one-page limit. I didn’t expect to write as many drafts as I did.