Reflection

Write a personal statement for admission to graduate study or professional school in which you describe how this class has prepared you for your future career. If you do not plan on applying to graduate or professional school, you can frame the essay as a personal reflection, or you can frame the essay as a letter, addressed to someone to whom you wish to explain what you learned in this class. WORD COUNT: between 300-500 words. Yes, a wide margin.

Some topics to consider: 

• Practical Applications: What have you learned in this course specifically about time management; personal responsibility; working under pressure; maintaining momentum; work ethic; persevering on a topic that you are not actually interested in; keeping up with readings; managing this course with your course load and/or work schedule/other commitments? 
• Social Applications: What have you learned in this course specifically about working with others; listening to other people's points of view; expressing your own point of view; cooperating in a group of diverse students with different skills, abilities, and interests; thinking about questions posed by Greek and Roman authors from a different time/place/society? 
• Critical Thinking: What are the skills that you have learned in this course specifically that can be applied to your career goals? Examples include: Attention to detail 
• Filling in the gaps: (Literature always requires the audience to know something about the myth/story; our poets do not spell everything out for us. Make a connection to a workplace/professional setting in which you are required to fill in the gaps.) 
• Challenging assumptions: (You came to this class with a set of assumptions about what the gardens would be, what the class would be. How were these assumptions challenged, and how does this prepare you for your next step in your career?) 
• Courage of conviction: (You've proven to yourself and to others that you have the courage of your conviction, to spend a semester studying something that matters to you and that you find valuable. Connect this asset to your future career.) 

I admit that the question assumes a fair degree of satisfaction on your part. You might rather play "devil's advocate," and reflect on how "useless" the course proved to be. If this is the case, then I ask you to include a procataleptic refutation based on this quote from Pliny the Elder: "No book is so bad as to not have something of use in some part of it" (Pliny, Epistles 3.5.10).