Posted by Tess T. | Posted on December 8, 2011
APhi Sophomores ♥
With the end of the semester in sight (only 10 days and 8 hours until Winter Break – but who’s counting??), I think it’s time to take a look back on my fall classes. My course load included:
- - Introduction to the European Union
- - Ancient Egyptian Civilization
- - Oceans and Atmospheres
- - Undergraduate Seminar in History
- - The Victorians
Being the stupid ambitious person I am, all three of those history classes are writing intensive; an experience that has been both challenging and rewarding to say the least. For those of you unfamiliar with this system, “writing intensive” is a label given to certain classes by the university that does “more than assign writing; it guides students’ practice in writing and makes writing an integral part of the course.” These classes have a minimum of 20 pages of writing assigned throughout the semester, and it is required for undergraduates to take four writing intensive courses over their time at Hopkins.
Considering I have written my fair share of papers this semester, I thought I would dedicate this blog to some choice essay prompts from my classes to give all of you prospective students an idea of what being a JHU humanities student entails academically.
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The Victorians
The Victorians is an upper level class that covers the history of the Victorian era of Britain and has definitely been my favorite class of the semester. We meet Wednesday afternoons for two and a half hours for our intimate class discussions. Not only does my professor Judith Walkowitz choose fascinating readings, we read about the impact of religion on interior decorating one week, but I love being in such a small and personal class.
I recently handed in my final paper, which was about the media coverage of the Ripper murders in the 19th century. Here was the assignment:
In her discussion of the media coverage of Whitehapel as a notorious space for the Ripper murders, Judith Walkowitz explains how the Ripper murders seemed to promote an argument from geography about slum dwellers and the degenerative influence of the urban space they inhabited. In promoting this argument, media coverage may have consolidated and intensified the notoriety of an urban space already marked as notorious. Write an essay that examines how “an argument from geography” operated both in the coverage of the Ripper murders and earlier.
Now I know this prompt might be a little confusing – when I first read it, I literally didn’t understand a thing, and I’m in the class! But after a little thought, I finally got it. In my paper I discussed how media coverage of the Ripper murders helped to shape and manipulate public opinion about the London neighborhood of Whitechapel. Newspapers exaggerated the negative conditions of Whitechapel to appeal to its middle and upper class readers, and constructed the negative reputation of this area. The media failed to recognize the stratified nature of the Whitechapel working population, and the fact that the area was more than just a crime scene and actually the home and the working place of many of the urban poor.
Silliness at Casino Night.
This paper was particularly interesting, because we were required to read actual newspapers and police notebooks from the period.
One of my favorite things about college is the opportunity to study subjects like the Ripper murders! I know that in high school I would have never been able to write an in-depth paper on such a specific topic.
Introduction to the European Union
Introduction to the European Union has proved to be an extremely interesting (and topical!) class that combines political science and history. Even though it is a lot of reading, I actually find myself looking forward to these assignments. Twice a week we meet for lecture in a large group, while once a week we meet in a small section to discuss the past week’s readings and lectures. This course set-up allows us to get the foundation of our knowledge base for the class from lectures, and to use the discussion sections for clarification and follow-up questions.
We recently handed in our final papers for this class. The prompt was:
Each student must select one EU institution, EU agency, or actor in the EU and evaluate its effectiveness in EU governance or policy area.
If you haven’t noticed from my previous blogs, I love to talk about food, so I decided to write an essay about it! In my paper I evaluated the effectiveness of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). I discussed the many challenges inherent in food policy, and the challenges facing EFSA as an independent advising institution. This class has provided me with the background necessary to understand the current EU crisis, which makes reading the newspapers a lot easier to follow!
Getting ready for Dorm Wars!
Ancient Egyptian Civilization
Ancient Egyptian Civilization outlines the Egyptian history and culture over nearly 3,000 years. A friend of mine in the class remarked the other day how much we had learned, and I was kind of astonished when I thought about it. Considering the only thing I had known about Egypt on day one was that Cleopatra lived there and had rocking fashion sense, I have certainly come a long way.
What’s especially cool about this class is that the professor, Betsy Bryan, is world-renown in the field and extremely well connected. We have had Skype conferences through out the semester with Cairo archeologists and museum curators. One of the people we talked to had just given President Obama a personal tour of the Great Pyramids, and then Skyped with us!
Here was the prompt for one of the papers we wrote this semester:
This paper will be a discussion of an ancient Egyptian object on view at the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum. You are asked to visit the museum and chose any object on view. For your paper, write a description of the object that includes the artifact type, its material, its size, its date, its provenance, and any defining physical features. Following the descriptive section should be an interpretive one that considers the function of objects such as the one you have chosen. Important is to explain how art encapsulates culture.
CANNOT wait to be reunited with my bestie Hannah over break!!
This was a cool assignment, because it involved taking a trip to the JHU Archaeology Museum. For those of you don’t know – Hopkins has its very own mummy! After browsing around the museum, I decided on a Ptolemaic funerary mask. For my paper, I discussed how my artifact was significance in explaining the complex funerary beliefs of ancient Egypt culture and religion. A significant portion of the ancient Egyptians’ lives was spent looking forward to and preparing for their journey in the afterlife. This mask highlights the extensive efforts ancient Egyptians went through to achieve eternal existence. This particular mask was thought to possess magical properties that assisted the deceased in the afterlife.
Writing this paper was challenging, as I had no real foundation in the subject to build my research upon. This entire class has been hard at times, because studying ancient Egyptian ways of life is so foreign to me, but it has definitely been worth it for expanding my worldview and historical perspective.
B'MORE LASER TAG.
Undergraduate Seminar in History
The Undergraduate Seminar in History is the only class that is specifically required for History majors to take. This full-year course is designed to teach History majors how to write a research paper of publishable quality. The entire second half of the class is devoted to personal research, concluding in a thirty-page thesis.
I actually already dedicated a blog to my first assignment in this class, Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in high school anymore. I scanned in an actual paper that my professor tore up marked up, so make sure to check it out!
Another assignment we had was:
Utilizing the reading from Week 4, write an essay explaining how a particular term, place or event is shaping your research.
I really enjoyed this prompt, because it allowed me to apply what we had discussed in class to my own research for my thesis. For this assignment, I wrote about how the opening ceremony of the 1908 Olympics set the stage for the English-American struggle and encapsulated the contradictions between nationalism and internationalism that would come to characterize the 1908 Olympic games. I showed the opening ceremony’s significance by explaining its compatibility with William Sewell’s (an author we read that week) definition of a historical event. Writing this particular paper helped to define areas of conflict I want to explore in my actual thesis, and serve as a solid foundation for my research.
As you can see, a lot of writing gets done in a given semester for a humanities student, but I hope you also see how interesting and rewarding it is. It’s important to go to a college where you wake up everyday wanting to attend class, and I am so fortunate to have found that here at JHU.
Name: Tess T.
