A500.9.3.RB.CourseReflections_CavaliereMike

What’s the true value of a master’s course? A classmate got me thinking about this very topic this week in our weekly discussion forum. Reading his post, I couldn’t believe how similar our experiences were when it came to academia: Neither of us loved school growing up, and we entered into our grad programs tentatively, but somewhere along the line, we “clicked in” to this program. We committed to the idea of being a student.

We became learners. … How did that happen?

Over the past year or so, I’ve asked myself that question a lot, but I think the answer’s obvious: We chose to be. Something inside of us always wanted to advance — intellectually, in our careers, as people, whatever — but our ambition wasn’t give a name, so to speak, until it had something solid to hold onto. This program was that thing. To me, that’s the true value of a class about critical thinking: It forces you to critical think. Whether or not you remember the exact names of all the fallacies, for instance, isn’t the point. The point is that you rise to the intellectual challenges presented in class and apply them to your own life. The point is that you begin thinking critically about what it is that you want out of life, and why, and how to get it.

What I might have done differently to improve my learning experience in this course is, I believe, very similar to what the course itself could have done differently — and that’s to direct my learning in a more focused way toward the capstone. Once I really got going on my action research and was enough weeks in to see clearly what I was interested in studying further, I almost felt like I was too deep to pivot in any real way that would require an extra time investment into literature research or surveying. That’s not a terrible thing – I feel like that kind of fine-tuning is absolutely part of the process — but it didn’t occur to me until the last few weeks that this research could actually serve as a bedrock for my capstone project in my final term. It’s a topic I’m passionate about, and I think there’s a lot of “meat” there, which is great — but I do wonder if my initial approach would have changed or improved at all if I was aware that expanding it for my final thesis was a possibility from the outset. Would I have asked different survey questions? Would I have sought out different articles, in order to build my research more around numbers than sentiments? Maybe.

Regardless, I like the format of term-length study. It feels like you can really get something “done” that way, and my experience in this course was all positive. The topics that rang the most relevant and applicable to life, for me, the ones that made the class the most valuable, were almost the most basic. What makes thinking critical? For me, the answer is questioning — and that’s how I approached my research project. I wanted to question personal debt and what’s “normal” when it comes to saving and spending. I tried to keep that challenge in mind throughout all of my coursework, and it will be at the forefront of my capstone work, as well. What’s the status quo when it comes to debt — and is it smart or wrongheaded to follow the outline of that “normal”? I think it’s a really interesting question, and one I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to dive so deep into if not for this course.