Intellectual Entrepreneurship, Cherwitz and Sullivan

From what I can gather from my surroundings, the thing that people most want out of American education is reform. From films like Waiting for Superman to the numerous government initiatives passed in the last 20 years (i.e. No Child Left Behind Act, Common Core education, promises of “free college”) and to my own experiences in school, the word on everyone’s lips is “reform.” But what is reform? It can differ in definition between groups, from the economic to the sociological; but the sort of reform proposed with Intellectual Entrepreneurship is the kind of reform I would like to see: an examination and shift of values within the student, as opposed to the system around them. Intellectual entrepreneurship tells graduate students that their greatest resources are found within them, not in any organization – not even the organization that tells them so. After all, students are often called “subjects”, so they should be the subject of education as opposed to the object. From this personal reform, I believe that the public perception of education will be clearer and more focused on further reform.

A particular quote from this article that rang out to me was how intellectual entrepreneurship “is a discovery process in which individuals continually and regularly learn more about themselves and their areas of expertise.” This idea is very relevant to how my life has been throughout this semester: trying very hard to discover things about myself and my future career, and making use out of whatever little success I have in either regard. Of course, that can become very frustrating, as I would have liked a linear direction in both academics and occupation for the convenience of not having to think hard and choose things for myself. While the slow and tedious discovery process of both my recent experiences and intellectual entrepreneurship is frustrating and honestly quite miserable to drudge through at points, there is an extraordinary opportunity there for personal growth that I just cannot deny. If I was, say, randomly assigned a career and a company to work for, it would save me so much trouble of putting myself out there and constantly having to fight against my contradictory ideas of what I’d like to be. However, through this slow-moving discovery process, I will be better for it because I will mature into a more stable and efficient version of myself. That philosophy that resides in intellectual entrepreneurship is something that I really admire and will have to save for the future.

While insightful and interesting, and certainly helpful for graduate students, that helpfulness doesn’t translate so smoothly for undergrads, I find. From my experience with undergraduate education (which is admittedly limited only to Stony Brook), that’s a time when students really benefit from organizations lending a helping hand in setting up rigid schedules and paths to their programs. By depending on the system within the undergrad years, a graduate student will have the skills and experience to successfully adopt intellectual entrepreneurship. While the ideas of intellectual entrepreneurship excite me, I feel as though I must keep them in my back pocket and save them for later.

 

The You Attitude and Reader-Centered Writing, Bovee and Thill

I was always reading as a kid, but it wasn’t until high school that I took notice of rhetoric – pathos, ethos, logos, all that stuff. I gradually understood by reading countless articles since then that the key to winning an argument with the person on the other side of the paper was to focus on them rather than me. From this, I was taking the audience’s expectations into account as much as my own voice when writing. So throughout reading this article, the general notion that effective writing relying on empathizing with an audience wasn’t news to me. Something that dawned on me while reading this, however, was that writing with “you attitude” wasn’t integral just for rhetorical writing, but really any kind of writing, and especially writing within the professional sphere.

The seven sections of this article covered how to use language to convey the “you attitude,” whether that was through diction, syntax, pronoun usage, and appropriately using the audience as the subject of a clause. This kind of empathetic writing style greatly befits a professional environment regardless of the field or profession. This is even so at the level of microscopic biology: cells need to communicate with one another appropriately as different anatomical areas (e.g. cardiac and muscle system) work in tandem with physiology to ensure that the body is a fully functioning machine. Empathetic writing and effective communication through “you attitude” is therefore how a healthy organization operates, just like a healthy human body made of many different parts.

An interesting and useful aspect of the empathy used in “you attitude” is how writing in that style frames the humanity of the author, masking their negative traits and emphasizing the positive ones. In section 1.6 of this article titled “the you attitude understands human nature”, authors Bovee and Thill emphasize seven aspects of human nature: we are self-centered, we are defensive, we are not perfect, we need specific goals, we expect courtesy, we need to feel appreciated for our efforts, and we do the best we can. These seven traits – both positive and negative – affect how a writer writes and how a reader reads, and in this relationship, the creator’s expertise is subjugated to the consumer’s expectations. “You attitude” constrains the writer to perhaps fudge the truth for the reader’s benefit, even if the readers are unaware of what the writer has done for their benefit. A writer has to be aware of these 7 traits in how it affects their writing and how it will affect the reader’s interpretation. This insight made me see that rhetorical writing and engaging in the pathos, ethos, and logos is more burdensome than I had previously thought, but that burden will have the effect of generating higher quality writing.

The next section of the article, “1.7: The You-Attitude avoids condescension by eliminating unnecessary imperatives” is an interesting flip of the relationship of human nature in writing. If the previous section revealed that writers must be aware of the human flaws in the readers, then this section reveals that writers must also be aware of the human flaws within themselves. Writers have a very powerful position (think of “the pen is mightier than the sword”) and they exercise that power through their rhetoric; however, they also have to retract that power by not making it seem like they are ordering the reader around. Even if you boil a piece of writing down to its rhetorical skeleton and it reveals that the writer is ordering the reader, the writer must not make it seem like it is so. For instance, if I’m a worker and I get a memo from the boss, I catch an air of authority to the paper, than human nature would compel me to rebel against this. Writing with “you attitude” therefore gives writers the power to change how they relay orders into suggestions, even if they really are just orders.

 

They Loved Your G.P.A. Then They Saw Your Tweets, Singer

There’s arguably no stronger characteristic in my generation than our investment in technological entertainment. From video games to social media, we create these worlds in the realms of cyberspace, but too often people see online and the real world as two separate realms – or at least don’t see where they would intersect. I think this forgetfulness is what leads people my age to not think before they “speak” sometimes, which can land them in huge trouble with their employer or their school. Singer, however, doesn’t just focus on the negative aspects that social media can have in the workplace, and brings up examples of academic institutions that take a degree of transparency and respectability toward their students.

Theoretically, I can see how institutions can benefit from and generate benefits from pooling over the social media accounts of their constituents, but only if they were trustworthy. People often place important and private information online, which they are ultimately responsible for, but bad data is out there doesn’t give institutions a right to rummage for dirty laundry. For instance, there was a story in the news back in May about a group of newly admitted Harvard students who were denied enrollment because of some offensive memes posted within a private facebook chat. I can see that Harvard was worried about their image and wouldn’t want politically incorrect material associated with them, but how much can a private facebook chat really represent such a prestigious university?

At this point, I feel I should mention that I have pretty much no social footprint online compared to my peers. I don’t have twitter or instagram, and while I do have a facebook profile, I haven’t posted an update in four years. Social media personally frustrates me in that I think it often brings out the worst in people: their prejudices, their brashness, their judgement, their uninformed opinions, and their desire for convenience and quickness over quality that often can only develop over time. Similarly, social media can also bring out the worst in institutions if they are heavily entrenched in them. Did Harvard do the community at large a service when they banned those students from entering their freshman years when they posted memes that offended them? Or, was Harvard merely placating the online masses in their short-lived fury while covering their embarrassment, and these students had their academics jeopardized as a result? It’s these hangups I have with social media that keep me from integrating with it so much, which I realize might put me behind the curve of my competitors in the field because they might have a twitter.

Something I did like out of this article was Singer’s point about how institutions might actually help mold their students’ online personas without punishing them for it. For instance, Brookline High School urged one student to change their email address from “bleedingjesus” to something perhaps more tasteful and attractive to an admissions officer or an employer. Normally, I would have a problem with an institution dictating people on what online lives they may take, but this is definitely an exception and actually benefits the student. The fact of the matter is that a lot of young people are deeply ingrained in a technological landscape that the older generations can hardly understand; also, young people tend to do stupid things that older people would not, and the internet provides them a platform like never before to broadcast their stupid actions. While the older generations that control the institutions that young people like myself have to rely on might not understand social media like we do, I think my generation can learn a lot about professional conduct from the older generation as time moves on and there’s a changing of the guard.