Brendan Moore

I wrote this paper as the final assignment for HU3606 Editing. We had to choose an issue related to editing, so I, as usual, reflected on my own experiences and honed in on the growing disconnect I felt between the working class and academia. As this was my “year off” where I was only a full-time student working 4 hours a week, I had a little more time to reflect and let my lived experience guide me to find research looking into some of the issues the socioeconomic underclasses face.

I have since gone back to working 20+hrs a week, but it’s now split between three jobs and more related my goals. The writing center helps scratch the altruistic itch, Story Spring Writing provides practice for a variety of middle-class skills, and 5th and Elm helps finish off the bills. However, I believe this is the most polished piece I’ve written at MTU, in no small part because of the time to sit with and interrogate the ideas—which only serves to reinforce the main point of the paper.

I wrote “The Cost of Criminal Records,” for my final paper in Social Psychology, the semester after writing “What Do We Know About the Working Class?” While there are many genre convention differences between a researched sub stack and an academic paper, I also noticed a lot of process differences brought about by the return to working 20+hrs per week during school. For both, I chipped away at assembling research, but it took a lot longer to be able to set aside time to sit down and write “The Cost of Criminal Records.” Ultimately, I had to finish writing it after working a show night at 5th and Elm.

I am proud of the attention to detail I managed to bring until 4am, but I do wish I had more time to write for the paper. However, that wish for expansion made it very easy to talk about the limitations for the paper by simply acknowledging the other pieces of the puzzle that I did not have time to talk about.

At the end of HU3XXX, Science Writing, my partner and I chose to talk about Self-Driving Cars. To be fully transparent, we chose it because of readily available research on the topic in the interest of having more time to handle final projects in other classes. However, we both ended up diving into very different perspectives on the topic, and that difference precipitated an interesting back and forth about technical capabilities and human concerns for the podcast piece of the project.

For the paper that fed into my side of the podcast, I dove into the ethical considerations of what we would need to change in society to accommodate self-driving cars, and whether or not that was worth it. The most interesting research article I found came from a group of researchers trying to create an AI that could mimic human’s ability to weigh and accommodate the ever-shifting possibilities of interacting with other people.

talk about capability of talking about these big abstract ideas, but bringing different thought process and trying to keep it grounded