Orientation Term is designed so that Big Picture students can get used to the learning environment and their peers, as well as discovering more about themselves.
During these first weeks we focused on community building as well as doing a mini project to get used to the process. As part of our quest to get to know each other, we were asked to do many trust exercises, and we also took a field trip to a ropes course.
After presenting our O term projects, we embarked on a two day camping trip for more team building.
My project was guided by this statement:
A well educated person understands that you don’t need to be well educated to be happy.
GUIDING QUESTIONS
1) Does the way an individual feels about the importance of education change with the amount of educational experience they have?
2) Do the ways individuals in the community perceive their own happiness correlate with their experiences with education?
3)Does having a higher level of education change an individual’s view on the importance of education?
Evidence:
Evaluation:
For a first project, I am very proud of my work. However, I do wish that I could have gone a little deeper into the topic. Here is some anonymous feedback from people who visited my exhibition:
Warm:
“Great topic; good research. I liked that she was surprised by the results.”
“Interesting data, great question”
” Interesting topic, lots of info on the tri-fold”
“Wow- huge research effort! Fascinating to show the correlations on the chart”
Cool:
“Would love to see the questions in an easier to read format”
“Make a hypothesis about why research came out the way it did”
” Present data more clearly”
” Might have been helpful if you guide us through the info verbally because you had so much”
Process: I started by finding a couple articles about my theory and researching how to make a good survey. I put my survey up for a few days before crunching the data, creating a graph, and analyzing the data.
Resources:
The main resource I used on this project was my survey. Having this was incredibly valuable because my main source of information was actual people and data that I collected myself. I also used this article from the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/why-so-many-smart-people-arent-happy/479832/ and this article from Time: http://time.com/3759397/education-happiness-mental-health/ to back me up.
Addison White's Big Picture Portfolio 