Project 5: Sustainable Futures Professional Narrative

The Sustainable Self as Story

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000297699802/541039f31d6c2f261190f37fad6b07a2.pngWho are we? What is our essential identity? What if we, as human beings, exist in the form of something as seemingly ephemeral and changeable as a story? While it might seem strange to consider at first, there is truth in this: as social creatures, we don’t exist separately from the stories we tell about ourselves. Each day, we live, perform, and revise the unfolding narrative of our lives.

Despite our natural inclination to share our story, the professional narrative–often referred to as a “personal essay” or “personal statement”–can seem tedious. We are constantly coaxed into offering some one or two page version of ourselves. What’s the point? Why must we narrate ourselves?

The point is this: if you are unable to tell convincing and lively stories about yourself, you appear to others as mere assemblages of boring facts and abstract values. Furthermore, research has shown that self-authorship rooted in reflection is crucial for both emotional and academic growth. For this reason, it is crucial to understand and practice the professional narrative. The professional narrative assignment will help you develop and practice a set of relevant rhetorical skills that you can adapt and mobilize when you face a range of different persuasive contexts such as interviews and scholarship essays

For this assignment, you will compose a 400-500 word (equivalent of one page single-spaced) professional narrative in response to the following prompt:

You have spent the semester engaging in sustainability-themed projects, you have done your best to engage in the broader Charleston community, you have considered campus opportunities for research and extra-curricular engagements, and perhaps even learned about awards and opportunities in the future that are relevant to your emerging interests.

Compose a narrative giving a picture of yourself as a sustainability-literate citizen-scholar during your first year at the College of Charleston. The essay can take a brief glimpse into your past, and it should relate some combination of formative academic, campus, and community engagements. As you look toward your own sustainable future, this essay should reflect the ways in which these experiences have started to define your early college career and provide some specific details about what you might undertake to achieve your future goals–as a scholar, citizen, and person.

The most successful narratives will gather 2-3 key experiences from the current semester that, taken together, aptly reflect a strategically chosen set of key values and competencies in a rich and textured narrative. These experiences, if at all possible, should include your research in HONS 11o and work in other courses, your community engagements, and your early thinking about potential research mentors in a field you are considering (as you pursued in the professor profile assignment, for example). You can also focus on matters of personal sustainability as well. The 3 Es get a lot of attention when it comes to the concrete realities of sustainability, but the 3Cs–consciousness, connection, creativity, and compassion–are just as important. Please feel free to make these an important part of your narrative as well.

Even if it seems like you don’t have much to write about at this early stage in your college career, your careful reflection on what’s happening now can make even the mundane appear momentous. In this sense, in addition to the most obvious content noted above,  you might also think small as well: an idea that seized your attention; an interaction with a peer or professor, a mentor or a mentee, that taught you something; a zoom talk or event you attended and how you related it to your own interests; an action you took to improve yourself or the world around you; efforts you made as an undecided student to clarify your interests. If you’re still absolutely confused about what you’re doing and why, if you have no idea what a sustainable future is at this stage and certainly don’t know how to tell a story about it, make that struggle the topic of your narrative. The best stories relate struggle as much as success.

Strategies & Structure:

While there is no cookie-cutter template that will work for any given narrative, there is a general pattern to how many of these essays unfold. Here is a rough sketch:

  • World, Me: First, you want to zoom in and situate the reader in the midst of a dynamic thought or action that suggests some of the essay’s grounding values and maybe even suggests some skills and competencies it will reveal. This is where your character comes to life. This experience doesn’t necessarily need to come from your first semester.
  • Frame it Out: next–and this might come at the end of the first paragraph or it might consume its own paragraph–you need to reflect a bit and contextualize the opening move. Here, you get to refer to things that might have happened before you came to school–your upbringing, early experience, etc. Or you might contextualize the opening in more recent times–your status as a student at CofC, etc. The key is to answer the question: how does the opening anecdote fit into your story of growth and development? If it’s not already clear from the anecdote itself, what did you learn? This is a key move that essentially transitions from a set-piece opening to the rest of the essay. This is where you make a subtle case for how whatever it was that emerges through that opening serves as a sort of guide for the rest of your narrative.
  • Paragraphing Experiences: the main body of the essay will most likely focus on a set of experiences from this past semester that embody and give substance to, in some form, the value or values suggested in the opening paragraph. This is where the character you introduce in the opening becomes more complete and complex, more fully “you.” Think of each experience as a potential paragraph, and think of transitions between those paragraphs as bridges not simply between boxes of text, but between key aspects of your story. Transitions show how you get from the lab to campus, from campus to the broader Charleston community, and from Charleston to the wider world, from a rough patch to a recovery (don’t forget the power of tension). Transitions are the engine for the growth and development that drives your story.
  • Making your Exit: Where have you been? And where are you going? In the conclusion, you will reflect briefly on the past and project into the future. You might return to the opening scene, or clarify the narrative of growth you’ve presented. Beyond that reflection, you will want to project the narrative’s grounding values meaningful towards specific future actions, plans, and goals.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said that you can’t step in the same river twice. Life is flux; life is movement. Your first-semester narrative will not be your second-semester narrative. This assignment, though, gives you some building-block skills and offers you an opportunity to practice the moves that these narratives invite. Sturdy templates such as the one presented above are made to be experimented with, tweaked, and, if necessary, broken.

This assignment is due on the date and time of our scheduled final exam (and it takes the place of a formal exam).

The rubric for this project will be similar to that for the SLN and will be modeled on the Professional Narrative self-evaluation tool

 

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