After all the testing, interviews, surveys, and etc. It's finally time to start writing. This week, I focus on getting my First Draft ready. Here's the link to my draft.
To refresh my memory of academic writing (since undergrad was ages ago), I attended the Academic Workshop hosted by the Center of the Advancement of Teaching.
The workshop was super helpful, I'd encourage future thesis students to attend if they offer more sessions next semester. After the workshop, I realized that writing is just like design. We need to apply human-centered design into writing as well. Who we are writing (designing) for changes the way we write! Ideally, we should make our reader's life as easy as possible. A few good tips I wanted to pin down here to remind myself are -
Change vague & stuffy to direct & clear
Change nouns to verbs
Change abstract (general) to concrete (specific)
Avoid excessive negatives
A book that was recommended to read is called Writing Without Bullshit, which I plan to get to improve my future writing. Lastly, when reviewing paper, it's important to focus on one "topic" at a time. If I'm reviewing the structure now, I should only focus on the structure. Then I can move on toe reviewing the transition and then the language. ONE AT A TIME!
Aside from writing, an interesting fact/news about iGrad & NYU I found this week -
As I mentioned repeatedly in my paper and presentations, the resources are available but students are not getting there. For instance, 10 out of 10 students I spoke to have never heard of iGrad. But things are about to change (I hope), an article published on Oct. 17, 2017 on iGrad, announced its aim to provide financial wellness education for diverse student population at NYU. In the article, NYU's Assistant Vice President of Enrollment Management, Lynn Higinbotham, comments on the importance of providing financial literacy tools to the diverse groups of students and the hope is to "encourage usage on the iGrad platform with advisors 'integrating [iGrad] into their conversations to students about affordability and financial responsibility in general'." So let's hope more students will be more aware of this resource available to them and hopefully when Hello Hannah is ready for pilot, it can be done through iGrad.