You do NOT want to be this student and realize you haven’t been saving any papers since freshman year.
I think it’s safe to say that no two people have identical goals when attending college. Sure, you and several hundred other people may go with the intent to find a job in the same field, but each individual has their own experiences that shape the direction of their careers. Regardless of which path you choose it is the general expectation that at the end you will have something to show for it; and I don’t just mean the degree to hang in your fancy CEO/doctor/movie star office.
Yes, movie stars totally have offices.
Nearly all of the majors that one can undertake in college will have some sort of final project that all of your previous work is meant to lead to. This can come in the form of the Education department’s student teaching, some sort of field-related internship, a capstone project or, in my case, a final English Portfolio.
The portfolio is meant to exhibit my developments as a student, display my contributions to the ongoing literary scholarship and highlight what I consider to be my biggest accomplishments within the major. Basically, we are expected to compile around 15 examples of our writing that satisfy a number of curriculum goals. It’s a staggering amount of work and requires an entire class devoted to its compilation. It’s also vital that we had the foresight to keep copies of everything we’ve written since we were freshmen. If you get to Portfolio class and don’t have any of your papers from previous years… well let’s just say it’s not a fun situation.
Though obviously not all of you will be dealing with this exact scenario (though I hope some will be, whoop whoop English majors!) I think the idea behind it is an important one. Keeping evidence that you actually worked your butt off in college only has upsides. You never know when a new job will want a writing sample and instead of coming up with something on the fly you’ll be able to pull a piece from your English gen ed. Or maybe if you’re writing code for a website somewhere down the line and realize that you did something similar in your computer science class and you can cut your work in half by seeing how you did it back then. It’s easy to think that some of the courses you’re going to take are just means to an end, but it’s impossible to guess if and when they’ll come into play in the future.
It may seem like a hassle to keep track of all the work you’ve done during your time here, but the benefits far outweigh the inconveniences. And as a laptop university it’s incredibly simple to back up your work in an instant. The free program I’ve been recommending to all my classmates in Portfolio, Dropbox, is incredibly helpful for any college student. With a quick registration you can get 2 gigs of cloud storage which means that whatever you put in your Dropbox folder will be accessible from any computer at any time. If you’re an incoming student (or any year really) I would recommend signing up and backing up your work regularly during your time here. Keeping a record of your time at WSU is a great way to build up the foundations for a resume, a thesis project or a portfolio.
Also, on a less responsible note it’s just incredibly fun to look back on the work you did as a freshman when you’re a senior
Some of those documents are now officially for my eyes only.
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