Goal 1

The Honors Program's first goal is to have students learn the ability to think critically, reflectively, and independently. Honors students learn how to achieve these goals through four outcomes. These four outcomes are: designing self-created learning experiences that have clear goals; analyzing problems or situations and to create informed opinions, conclusions, or solutions; interpreting texts from various disciplines; and conducting independent and ethical research. For this goal, I will discuss three outcomes and how doing them has helped me achieve the Honors Program’s first goal.

The first artifact that I am going to share is from Honors 250H - Foundations of Leadership where I fulfilled the first outcome by creating a self-created learning experience.

This class had a student created project where we needed to clearly define goals, and how we were to achieve them. Every student could choose what they were going to do that enforced our abilities as leaders. My project focused on increased involvement in Minot State’s Computer Science Club. The main purpose of this is that I was very reluctant up to this point to take part in extracurricular activities. I focused my mind on school and work. This project also had other goals. One of these was that I would take part in as many of the meetings and events as possible and that I am would not be afraid to speak my mind. That, also, was an important goal for me because I often considered myself to be introverted and would take things as they come and would stick to myself.

The second outcome aligns with the first outcome and artifact. This artifact is the slides from my final presentation for Honors 250H - Foundations of Leadership where I analyzed my self-created learning project and wanted to conclude if I had achieved my goals, and what I could do better.

The reason that I am using this artifact is that I needed to form my own opinions on whether I had achieved the goals I laid out in my goal statement. I think it is even more important because my goals are subjective, not a clearly defined done or not done. I had to think deeply about whether I had successfully completed my goals. I learned I did not complete my goals to my satisfaction. I took part in two of three events, but I did not actively participate as much as I would like. That was a difficult reality to me as a shy person that I did not change as much as I would have liked. I also had learned things from this experience that were not part of my goals. One of these was that I did not have the patience to teach for any extended period. We also needed to consider what we would redo in the event we could have the experience again. This was great because I had to critically think about what I could change and not just accept the experience at face value.

The third artifact that I am going to share is from Honors 351H - Integrity and the Examined Life where I fulfilled the outcome of interpreting texts from various disciplines.

This was an awesome class because it is focused on literature and movies. Having a class that involved reading books was novel as a computer science major. Also, as a person who enjoys reading, I really enjoyed the class. The artifact itself is the midterm paper for the class. We were given questions based on the material we had read and watched up to this point. I wrote mine on three of the books we had read to that point: Hillbilly Elegy, The Other Wes Moore, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The questions involved a lot of understanding the text, but also forming our own opinions. They were not simply “What did you like about the book” but questions such as “What Lessons Can Be Learned from Hillbilly Elegy?”, “Compare and Contrast the Two Wes Moores,” and “Is Shukhov a hero?” Each of these questions had answers that are completely subjective. The importance of them is that we needed to cite multiple examples from the text that supported our opinions. This is a massively important skill because in every career field it is important that one can read something and understand it enough to take information out of it and be able to use it to support complex ideas like opinions. This is a skill that greatly on this paper and the many following.

Critical thinking is a massively important skill that I believe is more important outside of an academic environment than in one. These artifacts are just some examples on how I could expand my ability to think critically.

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