Year 1

FUSE 101 was my introduction to the honors program. Having come from a small high school with a high GPA, I did not anticipate much of a challenge in this course, which was reflected by my first collegiate "incomplete." This placed the rest of my collegiate career into perspective: If I was going to succeed, I would need to accept that I was going to be challenged. Not only would I have to be comfortable with this, but I would also need to anticipate it. As FUSE 101 continued, I continued to be challenged, and I continued to learn how to be comfortable stating, "I don't know, but I would like to learn."

Throughout the class, we used Big Data as a topic through which to learn about information literacy and college-level writing. Although college-level writing typically concerns academic writing, Dr. Schur wanted us to be comfortable with experimenting with multiple forms of writing. I had never been comfortable writing narratives, so I felt that this was the best opportunity to challenge myself. So, for the final for his class, I chose to write using a narrative voice, which is a skill that I wanted to master but was not yet comfortable with.

The language is perhaps a bit too earnest, but it does reflect growth from the beginning of the semester.

In FUSE 102, we had the opportunity of learning from two professors, which provided two different, collaborative perspectives on the content of the course, which was a continuation of FUSE 101. The difference here, however, was the opportunity to learn about writing and information literacy through examining conspiracy theories.

For the final of this class, I chose to study the Sokal Hoax, which is a lie that originates from Academia. Sokal proposed this theory by suggesting that, due to the lack of recorded history during the so-called "Dark Ages," that they were actually developed by the Catholic Church to promote the Gregorian calendar, therefore centralizing the concept of time around a Euro-Christian perspective. This theory loses viability when the records from Africa and Asia are considered as, especially in the Muslim world, this was a period of major cultural development. Rejecting the existence of the Dark Ages also rejects the existence of these cultural epicenters and also centralizes Europe as the sole subject of Historical study. It also rejects the rich history of smaller European communities that eventually contributed to the Renaissance.

I also studied Holocaust Denial, which is another hoax that started within the realm of academia. This hoax is based in the belief that the Holocuast never happened, providing another revision on history. The evidence for this hoax tends to be self-sustaining, meaning that each item supports another item without any form of actual, tangible evidence. The evidence is also generated by alt-right thinkers and neo-nazi supporters, further demonstrating the bias of the proponents.

This project gave me an opportunity to study History through an analytical lense for the first time. It also gave me the opportunity to consider cognitive biases that turn stories and lies into conspiracy theories or that allow misinformation to spread so easily in the digital age. Likewise, it also gave me an exciting idea to pursue during the beginnings of the stay-at-home order and the pandemic.