Bao Le - Final Portfolio Introduction Rough

The Qualitative essay included within this portfolio was the second project for the writing class. Personally, I was much more invested with this particular project than the text based one.

This essay was meant to examine the benefits or costs of not having a student center at DU. I approached this essay with the idea that DU’s students have coped with not having a student center but was relatively unsure about whether this was detrimental or not to student life in general. My main point is to come to a conclusion as to whether a more traditional student center is needed at DU or not.

This topic has always been interesting to me as a commuter student. There simply is no designated place for students to spend their times outside of classrooms or dorms at DU. So to gather information on to what other students think, I’ve designed a questionnaire to ask my fellow students: Where do they spend their time and why?

The questions asked specifically ask my fellow students whether or not they spend their time on one location and the benefits or cons to each of these locations. These are used to determine whether or not students that would utilize the services of a student center would actually be for or against the ideas of having such a building on campus. Specifically, are the locations that these students have created enough?

I’ve used this data plus the data from my observations as to where the largest population of students gathers outside of classrooms to see whether students have created their own makeshift student center locations. The combination of this data should allow me to see if students exhibit a need for a student center or not.

The next project that I performed in my writing class was a project performed in the online application Google Maps. While my previous essays were mainly directed towards specific audiences, this particular project was interesting since the audience was literally the Internet. Writing for a much broader audience made it so that my diction had to be much more broad and more suited towards laymen.

This project is something that is really interesting to me as a commuter student. Mainly because as a commuter student, it is really hard to figure out where everybody congregates outside of his or her dorms. The purpose of this map to me was to help students explore communities and social hotspots at the University of Denver so that they can achieve the total college experience.

While doing this project, I received lots of feedback as to areas that I should explore, which is great because it really helped me break my original idea that social communities are hard to find in small college campuses. However, I could not include all of these locations due to the simple fact of time and lack of experience in my part. Another interesting note is that a bunch of these hotspots seem to only be active during set times in the day and it was very hard figuring this out since they are very deserted outside of these set times.

Another interesting problem that I ran into was that for some odd reason, whenever I used word to write drafts and then copy them into Google maps, the formatting would get really crazy. This meant that to save time, I just typed everything into the Google map directly, but a lot of the information would not get saved. Because of these factors, I basically had to retype my information multiple times.

Even with all of these pitfalls that I have run into, this project was very enjoyable for me. It directly benefited me during my research to discover that you can be socially active at DU without having to actually live on the campus. It was also a very welcome break from just straight papers since a lot of picture taking, and informal interviews. (Which were not included in the work; take that IRB!) I hope you will enjoy this piece as much as I did, and help us break the myth that small campuses are not as social as our larger counterparts.