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Joel Sawyer
Professor Jizi
UWRT 1102-010
10 May 2016

Dear Reader,
Over the last four months I feel as though I have grown quite a bit
within all of my skills as an academic writer. I had fallen away from writing in
the past but I feel as though I have had a love hate relationship. Now though
I think all the hate has left and I am truly remembering the joys of writing. I
organized my portfolio pages so that I have the finished products up first.
Everything that follows that is anything I did leading to the final product. I
know that it may not look like much but everything I have in here I believe is
an improvement from where I began.
When I heard that our first part of the class was going to be
researching happiness I had a lot of mixed feelings on the subject. I have
always been curious about how to have greater happiness, but at the same
time I am not one who likes to be told that I have to research a specific thing.
I found a quote this semester that I really liked and I felt as though it would
help me to get through the things that I didnt like. It is by Jiddu Krishnamurti
and it goes There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass

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an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the
moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning. Since
one of my core values from last semester is knowledge and I love to learn
about anything I used the quote to remind me of that. The first paper that we
wrote for the semester about what happiness means to me was pretty
interesting to me. Learning about where my personal happiness by looking
inward was fun. I know that I found happiness in those places, but to actually
put it on paper and see that for my self was kind of strange. All of the
research that we had to do was really interesting because I think that it
challenged me on some of the way that I look at happiness as it pertains to
me. I do not think that anything really permanently changed my thinking on
the subject, but like other perspectives.
I wrote many double entry journals this semester over the readings
that we had for happiness and for the TedTalk with Dan Gilbert. I am still not
a huge fan of them, but I can understand why they could work for certain
people. It did make looking back over and checking out the main info I
selected from the article much easier. I just do not believe that it is a
necessary skill for me to use, at least in the compactly of this class. Maybe in
the future if I have much longer readings where there is quite a lot more
information I may pull out a DEJ. When we had to do the DEJ for our article
for the EIP I never looked at it again because I liked the raw information from
the article and it was easy to scan through.

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By far the most important thing this semester has to have been the
extended inquiry project. Your methods of interest inventory and finding our
character strengths made my selection process much easier. Although I
already kind of knew that I wanted to do something related to the medical
field. Once I had made my decision to do the research on stem cells I started
looking at articles and immediately was worried I wouldnt be able to
comprehend the discourse used in them. I am not proficient in a lot of
scientific medical terminology, but it was just one hurdle and I knew that I
could overcome. I was quite surprised once I got rolling on the research
about how much I was enjoying the overall project because I got to learn a
lot about something I found that I was actually very interested in. Even
though the EIP was the most important and honestly the most fun, to me it
was the most difficult. Only reason I say that was because of the size of the
paper. I have not really had to do anything that extensive in a very long time
so I just kept chipping away at it and low and behold I think I put out a good
quality piece.
For the last two things my ePorfolio and genre project I dont know
what to say. Well I guess I could say that I get very frustrated with
technology so the ePorfolio tested me. I got it all done and on it so I have a
sense of pride every time I do anything like it since it is so challenging. As for
the genre project I knew from the start that I wanted to do a pamphlet or a
power point, but I decided to go for a more non-traditional project so I chose

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the pamphlet. I had a hard time creating it once again due to the technology
and my skill being very rusty.
I am going to take so much from class this semester because I have
been away from academia for such a long time. Also since I am going into
civil engineering I feel like doing more research papers this semester will
help to prep me for research I may need to do for my degree. Going forward
I like having the tools in my bag as it is said such as the free writing and
DEJs, even though I do not know if I will us it. I like having it available if I the
time comes where I think it would be helpful. I enjoyed taking both of your
classes and thank you for the experience.
Sincerely,
Joel Sawyer