Sophomore Honors
During my sophomore year, my first year as an IUPUI honors student, I worked on a variety of projects which are displayed here.
"I Want to Become" Statement
I want to grow as an honor student at IUPUI with additional values and qualities like creativity, diversity, and leadership. The end goal is for me to become a more well rounded academic and professional so that I can show proficiency in more than just my major or academic field of choice.
The first quality I want to explore is creativity. Instead of just doing the required course work, I want to explore how I can get the most out of the classes I take in order to reach my full potential in each course. This ties into creativity because, while I may be doing honors contracts, I still have to think outside of the box in order to make these contracts not only meaningful for the class, but also my long term goals within my education and future career path in Library Sciences.
The second quality is diversity because I want to explore different aspects of myself and my education outside of the required courses for my degree. So if that’s joining an organization that is not related to my degree path, taking courses that are more geared towards my other interest areas, or internship opportunities that give me more skills than those I may be required to have, I want to do it. I already have joined the Campus Citizen as well as work as an O-Team leader, but I think exploring diverse opportunities could help me broaden my knowledge base to make me a more well rounded academic and person overall. This may also mean completing honors contracts that are outside of my major so that I can gain a deeper appreciation and understanding for that particular field of study.
The third quality I was looking to explore was leadership. I already do a little bit of this through being a First-Year Seminar Peer Mentor, but I want to push myself further in order to see what it is that I am truly capable of. Perhaps this is becoming an O-Team coordinator later on in my education, or seeking another type of leadership role like being a TA, becoming an honors mentor, or leader in some other program, I think that these would pose great learning opportunities for me where I can learn more about my own strengths and weaknesses as a leader.
In conclusion, I want to become an honors student who is creative with their education, explores diverse opportunities and courses, and takes leadership roles in order to broaden my skills and knowledge base as an academic and professional.
"I Am" Statement
I am a queer, disabled woman who looks at the world through a unique lens because I have faced adversity. I am someone who seeks diverse opportunities that allow me to grow as an individual. I am a dedicated friend who is at times brutally honest because I care enough to say so. I am someone who has had the opportunity to meet/work with diverse groups of people through extracurriculars and working on campus pushing me to explore what it means to be a leader and a creative thinker. All of this culminated in me wanting to push myself further to explore what I’m capable of through taking leadership opportunities as well as choosing to be an honors student to push myself in my academics as well.
When working on my "I Am" statement and my "I Want to Become" statement, I was asked to look introspectively at my own experiences to determine what about myself and my values were the most important to me and my experience as an IUPUI honors student. These two statements reflect who I am as an individual and the factors that mean the most to me when it comes to my future hopes/prospects.
HON-H 200 My Journey Map
I was asked to make a map of some of the experiences in my life that led me to where I am today as well as how they led me to my current experience in honors college. I chose a train design because you can make stops along the way, but you always continue forward on your path. This assignment allowed me to reflect on my own experiences and consider what parts were the most influential to where I am today.
Through taking time to consider the various high and low points of my life, I was able to see which points meant the most to me and my journey to where I am today as an IUPUI honors student. For me, I thought about the various hurdles I have overcome regarding my mental and physical health, and how, despite those challenges, I was still able to achieve high levels of academic success.
Specialized Information Systems in Library Sciences Across Career Fields
I chose to write this paper as one of my honors contracts for my Organizational Informatics class I took my sophomore year. Because I am interested in pursuing Library Sciences in the future, I thought that incorporating it into my honors contracts would allow me to further explore my field of interest through the lens of the class I was taking at the time. Specialized Information Systems such as automated content summarization and categorization systems making looking for and understanding information more attainable. For this particular project I wanted to look at the ways these types of tools could be reapplied outside of the usually assumed uses within the context of a public/academic library.
HON-H 200 Cognitive Biases in Collaborative Spaces
I worked with a group of four other individuals in order to address a specific problem and connect it back to the honors experience. In this project I specifically worked on the information for the perfectionism bias and the slide talking about how honors students may approach group work versus what group work is generally considered to establish. This gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own experiences and try to implement better teamwork while working on this assignment.
The interesting part of this project was reflecting on how we worked as a group to create the assignment, the ways in which we did and did not work well together. Through looking at various ways to wok better as a team, we were able to find ways to make our project better as a group rather than thinking about it as individual parts strung together.
Application of Proper Data Organization and Preservation Techniques
Proper data representation and preservation techniques are integral in order to have data that is easily accessible, able to be analyzed, and stored in a way that it will be stand the test of time. For my Data Organization and Representation class, we spent a lot of time looking at the ways data can be organized and how that translates to proper preservation of knowledge. For my honors contract I wanted to take a look at an existing data set and determine the techniques being used, the uses for the data being stored, and what kinds of techniques may improve the preservation of the data set being analyzed.
Piece by Piece: SQL Archival Database
For this course's final project, I was tasked wtih creating my own database. In order to make this an "honors" project I made an accompanying catalog based on the data stored in the database. As a basis for the information included in the database, I chose to use the Conner Prairie Historic Clothing Database as the items stored in it. The attached PDF is of the catalog itself, and the image to the right is of the database I created because unfortunately SQL files are not supported on Wix.
