About This Portfolio

The role of a portfolio often is to review, synthesize, and reflect on knowledge gained or created during a period of time. In my case, this portfolio will serve as a way for me to look back on my time as a MA student in Michigan State University’s department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures. Initially I wanted to create a traditional portfolio, but after some brain-dumping and drafting, I realized that that wouldn’t be a good representation of my MA… or at least a representation I could be happy with. Instead, I decided to create this website. There are a few different reasons as to why I made this choice. The first and most important being that I learned about a lot of cool tools and theories regarding multimodal composition and wanted to show off what I learned instead of just writing about it.

This site is not perfect by any account, but it’s a good representation of all of what I’ve learned given that I could not have built this when I first embarked on my MA journey. The second reason why I made this choice is contextualization. Each piece of writing I created exists within several contexts; the context of me as a researcher, the context of the courses I was taking, and the context of the general state of the world, just to name a few. In a traditional portfolio, the pieces of writing would have been separate from the reflective component, but here I get to bring them closer together. The final reason might be the least academic but I believe it to be just as important; I’m creating a website because it’s fun. It’s been fun to create; I hope it’s just as fun to read; and given that we are still in the middle of a global pandemic that’s made learning and teaching harder for everyone, there’s a lot to be said for the pedagogical potential of fun.

About My Time at MSU

Above is a timeline composed of snapshots of the things I did (or that occurred) during my MA journey. Would it have been easier just to link my CV or resume? Absolutely, but instead I wanted to create this timeline because of the particular view it gives the reader. Here you can see some of the same stand out events that would be featured on one of these documents, but you get to see them in the same order that I experienced them instead of separating one from the others because of the genre’s rules of categorization. Additionally, it gives me enough space to show different contexts that affected the way in which I crafted the pieces of writing contained in this portfolio such as what classes I was taking together or what kind of work I was doing outside the classroom.