Admissions - Undergraduate Admissions @ Rowan University

Peer Reviews and Critiques

I’ve mentioned more than once on this blog the importance of getting support from my friends and classmates. There’s one particular type of support that’s been especially critical in the last couple of weeks of the semester: the peer critique.

Some teachers encourage students to offer critiques and reviews of each other’s work; others require it as part of your grade. Regardless of whether it’s required or not, however, it’s an extremely useful process. Just within this past week I’ve given three students peer reviews of their papers, and gotten reviews from them in return. The feedback can be extremely helpful in a variety of ways.

For one thing, it always helps to have a second set of eyes to check for spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes. After spending hours writing a paper, it’s easy to miss some mistakes, no matter how thorough you are. Sometimes it’s possible to read a paragraph three times and still miss the mistake, simply because you’re tired, or because when you’ve read something already your brain skips over a lot of it automatically because it’s already familiar. A fresh set of eyes with a new perspective, however, can often find things you might have missed.

Another helpful point can be if you have questions or concerns about your paper, and you’re not sure what to do about them. This can include questions about whether a certain part of the paper makes sense, whether certain things need to be cut, whether some areas need more detail, and so on.

One of the papers I reviewed this week was fairly long, and the student had remarked that he wasn’t sure if some of the content needed to be trimmed down. After reviewing his paper, I was able to offer suggestions about which sections were the most important, and which ones strayed a bit from his central thesis. Hopefully, the suggestions will help him strengthen his paper (and of course, get a better grade).

I’ve had my own issues at times when a paper or short story wasn’t well developed enough, but I wasn’t sure where to focus my efforts. Feedback from other students often proved helpful for me to figure out which sections needed the most development, or which were the most interesting. Sometimes just finding out a certain part of the paper or story grabbed the reader’s attention can help me know which area is the best to expand. The result is a stronger, more engaging read.

Then there’s the possibility that something in a paper is just plain confusing. With research papers in particular, it can sometimes be hard to express a point clearly and concisely. If something needs to be revised and clarified, it’s much better to find out before the paper is handed in to the professor. That way, it can be fixed ahead of time, and it won’t have a negative impact on your grade.

Students can also get help at the Rowan Writing Center. They offer critiques, reviews, feedback, and support for every kind of writing issue you might have. Also, the people working in the writing center are extremely well experienced with writing and critiquing. I know several students in the Writing Arts major who work there. Their help can be especially useful if you’re, say, a math or science major, and you might be better at the technical and mathematical work than at the writing. Of course, I know plenty of Writing Arts majors who would love some help with their math homework, too!

And now that I’ve gotten the feedback I need on my own papers, it’s time to go revise them and get them ready to hand in. Next week is the last week of classes. I’ve got a lot of work to get done between now and then…

Exciting Video Projects at Rowan

I think when most people think about going to college, the image they get is of sitting around a library, reading boring textbooks, and writing long papers. My experiences at Rowan, however, has been far more interesting and technologically advanced. One great example of that is a class I took called Writing, Research, and Technology, taught by Professor Bill Wolff.

One of the focuses of this class was exploring the idea that “writing” isn’t simply limited to typing words on a page. We analyzed semiotic rules and visual rhetoric, learning different ideas about how to send a message and compose in the digital age. As part of this, students were given an assignment to create our own YouTube video mashups.

Yes, in college we learned how to make our own homemade YouTube videos.

Working on this assignment was a fascinating and fun experience. We learned not only how to edit the videos and create montages of clips, but also how to use those clips in the most effective way. We spent a lot of time learning how to choose the most effective video clips, the most effective way to choose what order to play them in, and how to make the biggest and most interesting impact on our audience. Anyone can make a sloppy recording on their webcam and throw it online, but the techniques we learned in this class taught us how to make professional, exciting, and stimulating videos that are far better than anything someone would make at home.

I asked a few of my friends and classmates, and they told me they were happy to let me share the results of some of their work in the Writing, Research, and Technology class. Here are a few of their awesome videos, to give you an idea of the sort of projects you can work on in Rowan classes:

Maria G. made an entertaining video about file sharing and copyright laws, which she titled “File Sharing and Internet Piracy.”

Cassie S. made an upbeat political commentary about former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, called “Mitt Romney: The Business Man.”

Devon W. made a moving political video that touches on a variety of issues, titled “The Political Machine.”

I had a great time in this class, and this is just one of the wonderful projects we worked on. Everything in the class was modern and geared towards the digital age. We even incorporated blogging and tweeting projects into the class, creating a mixture of in-person and online learning.

Education today is a constantly changing and evolving process. Rowan does a great job keeping up with the times, updating their programs to meet the needs of the 21st century. Going to Rowan today is a far different experience than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago. I’m glad for a chance to embrace these new ideas and benefit from them as I get ready for my future career.