Academic

Planning Matrix
The Academic Planning Matrix is a graphic created with the hope that you and your
students will enjoy thinking about the core learning outcomes Baylor endeavors to provide
for all students over their four undergraduate years here. Students might use this form to
begin to imagine how their experiences here, both inside and beyond the classroom, might
interact with these goals and add vitality to their college life.

As a discussion within the class, a junior or senior might come to the class to talk about the
way he or she would personalize the grid, as an individualized means of looking back on
their own singular education. Students might enjoy hearing another, more advanced
Baylor student describe the way a full education can be realized through paying attention
to these learning outcomes.

Included in this document is a completed matrix from Rachel Wilkerson, a recent graduate,
who has offered to share her overview of what stood out to her during her undergraduate
days. Her annotated matrixcomplete with photographsis a thoughtful and fun
resource for this discussion as well.

Our Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education describes Baylors basic outcomes this way:
This core knowledgewhich is rooted in essential texts, skills, and idealsbuilds
community, opens students minds to new possibilities, and provides young people with
access to political and cultural influence. The full overview of these goals is stated in the
piece on Baylors General Education Outcomes by Dr. Wesley Null in the Possible Readings
section for this week of the curriculum. Our hope is that students might find these goals
and this matrix useful as they begin to maximize their experiences at Baylor.

Academic Planning Matrix

Skills and Values

Introductory

Intermediate

Advanced

Experiential

Communication and
Quantitative Skills

Critical Reasoning and Analysis




Intellectual Depth & Breadth,
Integrative Learning



Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana (for the
Church and World, through
leadership and service)



Christian Perspective and
Ethics, including knowledge of
Christian scripture and heritage

Freshman

Sophomore

Junior-Senior

Freshman-Senior

Progression of Skills and Values through a Baylor Education: by Rachel Wilkerson

Skills and Values

Communication and
Quantitative Skills

Introductory
Freshman
Ancient GTX
Beginning French

Intermediate
Sophomore
Colloquium
Oxford Christians
British Philosophy

See Commentaries # 1 4

Critical Reasoning and

Analysis

Calculus III

Commentaries # 5 9

Olafsen Research
Old French Independent
Study
Core Mathematics
Courses: ODE, PDE,
Complex Variables,

Advanced
Junior-Senior
AAS Conference in
Washington D.C.
Physics Research Courses
Graduate level math courses:
Abstract Algebra, Graph
Theory, Extremal
Hypergraphs

Mathematical Analysis
Sequence, Thesis
Courses, UScholars
Capstone, French
Literature Capstone

Selective Student-Life
Opportunities
M.D. Anderson
McDonald Observatory
Baylor Nonlinear
Dynamics
Budapest Semester in
Mathematics (BSM)

Exit Interview
Languages: Arabic,
Hungarian
Electives: Ceramics

Packard T.A.
Physics Tutoring
The Pulse Editorial
Staff

Intellectual Depth &

Breadth, Integrative
Learning
Commentaries # 10 - 13

FAS: Revolution and

the Church

Advisors: Mathis,
Colon, Vardaman

Moody and Jones

Libraries

Reading List

Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana

(for the Church and World,
through leadership and
service)

Chapel

Confirming Major and

Vocation: Budapest,
Mission Waco

Mathematics GRE Subject

Test

Meetings with Career

Services professionals

Marshall and Fulbright

applications

General Physics II,

Religion and
Literature

Commentaries # 14 16

Experiential
Freshman-Senior
Maximizing Skills:
Departmental Tutors,
Writing Center &
Success Center

Visited Graduate Schools:

BSM
Mission Waco
Childrens Program
Crossties Gospel Caf
Bel Vr Budapest

Researched PhD programs

Christian Perspective and

Ethics, including
knowledge of Christian
scripture and heritage
Commentaries $ 17 19)

Univ. 1000
REL 1310 & 1350
Mission Waco
Childrens Program

Christian Literary
Classics Ralph Wood
Campus Lectures and
Exhibits
Miroslav Volf lecture

Christian Spirituality.

Dayspring Baptist
Church
Choir, Cleaning Team,
Nursery Worker

Progression of Skills:
[Anne] What I want to get out of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of
living life and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and help other
people and myself.
Mr. Harrison nodded.
Thats the idea exactly. Thats what college ought to be for, instead of for turning out a lot of
B.A.s, so chock full of book-learning and vanity that there aint room for anything else.
--L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

1. My first class in college is Beginning French at 8:00 in the morning. My two best friends
in college are seated on either side of me, but I havent met them yet. Professor Duran
walks in, and with a Bonjour! and a Comment allez-vous? our immersion-style class
begins. Later, when I find myself attempting to teach English to a group of gypsy
teenagers, I will mimic Monsieur Durans style of teachingremembering how he
demanded quick verb conjugations from us until they became a natural extension of our
vocabulary.

2. Ever since I ran out of the room and vomited during a monologue performance in
seventh grade, I decided to mime my way through all future presentations. I simply
accepted the fact that when it came to public speaking, my communication skills would
remain lacking. When I entered college and worked in labs, PowerPoint presentations
were suddenly, nauseatingly unavoidable. I started slowly with group lab presentations
sitting down at tables surrounded by the people I worked with every day, friends who
cared about and understood my research. Gradually, sitting at the conference table on
Monday afternoons became a friendly placea place for collaboration and curious
questions. After a semester of presentations, I found that I cared more about conveying
the information in my research than fearing the sea of eyes fixed on me.

3. The plane lands at Reagan International Airport in the middle of January, just after the
snowpocalypse of 2010. I lug my suitcase and poster tube onto the subway, and as the
car lurches forward to the stop of the hotel hosting the American Astronomical
Conference, I notice that more and more astronomers pile into the subway car with
their poster tubes. The lobby of the hotel is a buzz of presentations on galaxy
classification, white dwarf stars, and aster seismology. I meet with collaborators from
Germany and Santa Cruz over Indian food at a restaurant down the street. As I present

my poster, I befriend my neighbors in the globular cluster category.

4. My upcoming term paper in medieval Great Texts requires a scheduled appointment
with the writing center. I schedule mine reluctantly, but when I enter Carroll Science for
the first time Im immediately taken with the wood paneled walls and the smell of
books about the place. The English graduate student assigned to me smiles a friendly
smile and asks me to read my essay aloud. The simple act of reading my work aloud in
front of another person brings to light more than a few embarrassing grammatical
mistakes. As I consider the weak points in my argument I am reminded of A.A. Milnes
Pooh as he remarks, when you are a Bearand Think of Things, you find sometimes
that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out
into the open and has other people looking at it. So the Writing Center becomes the
place where I let my ideas for a walk out in the open.

5. In Calculus III, I encounter three dimensions on the chalkboard for the first time. Dr.
Mathiss chalk lines wiggle on the board and every two-dimensional drawing of a three
dimensional lump represents a potato. In General Physics II, problem solving becomes a
very real problem. The sphere of charge mentioned in the problem was the Death
Star. Besides sharpening my ability to manipulate equations, these courses introduced
me to mathematical modeling and connected the equations, the framework, the
reasoning, to the interactions in the world around me.

6. One week sophomore year I spent a week of long hours subsisting on the BSB vending
machines trying to write a Matlab program that would produce a fractal fern. Fractals
completely and utterly fascinated me, but the mechanics behind the program
completely and utterly eluded me. It was a long week of trial and error programming, a
week of failed solutions, a week of frustrations. Only looking back on it after a few years

can I say that it was also a week of understanding. From the failed solutions I learned
how not to initialize variables, write arrays, utilize loopsin short I learned the art of
debugging. It was slow, painful learning, but it was terribly useful in the long run. And
when this finally popped up on my computer screen,

I remembered that I still loved fractals.
7. Proof writing has never been my strong suit in mathematics. I tend towards painting,
writing, crochetingthe arts in short. Creation, rather than analysis comes easily to me.
So, naturally, one semester I took four proof-writing courses, and it was terrible. In fact,
it was well near impossible, but fortunately, it was also interesting.

8. The Math Contest in Modeling is a 96 hour long caffeine fueled marathon in which
teams of three students examine a problem, devise a model, test their models by furious
programming, write a professional paper detailing their results. My roommate and one
of our friends have agreed to compete with me. We read, type furiously, and sketch
model after model with expo markers. At some point I fall asleep in a makeshift bed
made with two swivel chairs. At the end of four very strange days, the packet detailing
our solution falls out of the printer into my hands, and I am elated (and sleep-deprived).

9. BSM: McDonald Observatory


10. In the first day of my Freshman Academic Seminar class on Revolution and the Church, I
look down to see The Communist Manifesto on the syllabus,

11. One Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 I meet with two professors and one of my best
friends from University Scholars for my Exit Interview. I have read Don Quixote in its
entirety but neglected The Faerie Queene (not recommended).

12. On Wednesday afternoons at 4:00, the conference room in Morrison fills with the staff
of The Pulse. I served on the editorial board for three years, and loved every moment of
it. Sophomore year, I readied a paper on TNT and earthworms for publication.

13. There is something about song lyrics that sticks in your head for a good long while. In
chapel one day Kirstyn Getty came and sang a song entitled Dont Let Me Lose My
Wonder, and Ive never forgotten it. Derek Webb and the Welcome Wagon host a
concert and are immediately added to my list of bands to like long after music trends
have faded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytwcC1kbl0Q

14. Dr. Woods office is two stories of wall-to-wall bookshelves. The window behind him
faces the quad. I wonder aloud if I should write childrens novels or pursue
mathematics. We talk about church choir, then chaos theory, then Flannery O Connor
and then metachaotics. I dont leave the office with answers, but I do leave with an
interview by Cormac McCarthy. Later Ill quote it in scholarship applications to study
complexity science, but for right now I just read it and wonder.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.
html#printMode

15. In the few and far between moments of spare time during the spring semester of my
junior year, I spent a lot of quality time on Google searching for graduate programs.
Overwhelmed by the sheer number of options, I decided to read scholarly papers until I
found a particularly compelling article. I subscribed to podcasts and newsletters from
research institutes. I listened to RadioLab on NPR and googled my way into
correspondence with more than a few researchers.
http://www.radiolab.org/

16. Crossties: Today I am the only person working the back room. I have discovered new
skills, namely the ability to balance five brownies in one hand and two slices o Banoffee

in the other. I take plates, scrape plates, scramble, refill sweet teas, drink unsweet tea,
grab coffee mugs, a dozen things. When I bring the man that sits in the back corner a
slice of store-bought lemon cake from HEB he thanks me profusely. He eats a bite,
savors it slowly, counts and says its the third time in his life he has ever tasted lemon. I
realize I dont know how to appreciate lemons like that; I dont know how to thank God
like the man in front of me does.

Budapest:

17. My Christian Heritage class meets at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning and is taught by a
graduate student. It should be a miserable class. When I trudge in and am greeted by
the aroma of coffee and donut holes I realized I have misjudged class horribly. Before
class starts, our professor plays a song relevant to the discussion for the dayKnockin
on Heavens Door by Bob Dylan when Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the Doors of
Wittenberg. Christian Heritage is an improbably fantastic course.

18. I arrived at Paul Powell Chapel of Truett Theological Seminary late. The pews were full
to bursting and the floor was full of standing with seminary students. I slipped in and
sat in the doorway, a few minutes late into the talk. Miroslav Volf, Professor of Theology
at Yale University Divinity School was giving a lecture on a topic entitled Do Muslims
and Christians Believe in the Same God? Perhaps the chapel was full of firecrackers,
waiting for the speaker to utter a few heresies. The soft-spoken man up front
approached the topic with respect and a very apparent reverence for both belief
systems. I still have my notes from his lecture, and his talk sparked my interest in his
further theological writings. His book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture
Stripped of Grace changed the way I approach relationships. When I traveled in the
Balkans and saw the bullet holes left from the violence in Serbia and Bosnia and

Herzegovina, I was reminded of Volfs book. He learned forgiveness as a direct result of

the violence in his homeland.
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Charge-Forgiving-Culture-Stripped/dp/0310265746
Azar Nafisi
Marilynne Robinson stands in front of the podium in the reading room in Alexander
Reading Room. She says, I think theres too much anxiety attached to doubt. Doubt is
like taking a breath. It is exactly what I need to hear. She speaks on Writing as an Act
of Faith. When she leaves I devour her books: first Gilead then Home.
http://www.amazon.com/Gilead-Novel-Marilynne-Robinson/dp/0374153892

19. I vault up the three flights of stairs in Tidwell Bible Building to sit in the corner of the
room with Brothers Karamazov. Ive never read Dostoyevsky before and somewhere
between the mastery of the novel itself and Dr. Woods compelling teaching style, the
book becomes central to who I am. Later, in the same class, we read the poetry of
Gerard Manley Hopkins. Nondum leaves me stunned. Of course I dont know it at the
time, but this poem is how I will end my thesis senior year.

Rachel Wilkerson currently works for Baylor University as the Regional Director for the
Texas Hunger Initiative in her hometown of Lubbock.