They say honesty is the best policy. I personally think a little white lie here and there is sometimes the best policy. Nothing good comes out of telling your friend they look fat in their favorite outfit or that their new haircut makes them look like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.

In all your classes your professors tell you that Academic Integrity is not only morally right, but it is the only way to pass your classes. This makes all of those long hard essays I talked about in my last post seem even more grueling. How is it possible to write five or eight pages with only your own words?!

Easy, when you truly understand what it means to have Academic Integrity. You can use other people’s words! Just quote them. My learning assistants help me name drop long meaningful quotes into all of my essays.  These quotes not only take up space, they allow you to use other people’s ideas and words to support your own claims. Another important thing to remember when you work so hard on spinning out those pages is you can still tell a lie. You just cannot lie about statistics or use other people’s works as your own.  But! You can actually tell five pages worth of lies, if they are your own lies. I have done it.

An essay for my communications class required me to explain a failed relationship I have been in and analyze why it failed. Just between you and me, I haven’t had enough relationships to talk about how they failed. A week isn’t enough relationship to analyze for a five page paper. Like I said in my last post, I enjoy sitting in the classroom and complain to my LA’s and advocates (advocates are like mini LA’s, they only work a few hours a week rather than all week like LA’s). I believe my droning went something like, “I don’t know how to write this paper! I haven’t even had a relationship since fifth grade and I don’t remember that one well enough to analyze it for five pages.”

“Make a relationship up,” said one of the Advocates.

So I did. It was five pages of why my relationship with Jimmy failed. It analyzed all the stages of ending a relationship, just as our instructor wanted. I got a high A on the essay. It turns out my imaginary relationship which came to a terrible imaginary end, was a beautiful relationship with my GPA. My Res’ College staff help me out so much.  They keep me inspired to do more and better yet they informed on what is safe to say and what would get me into trouble.

When looking up what it means to define vitality according to dictionary.com vitality means the capacity to live grow or develop.

UCA’s acronym for the school motto is AVID. AVID means Academic Vitality, Integrity and Diversity. Academic vitality means to me the ability to continue to learn and adapt to learn in different styles and be open-minded about learning techniques. In EDGE residential college we have tons of different classes to take and in the same place that we live in.

With so many diverse classes each professor has a different way of teaching. In EDGE Residential College it doesn’t matter what your major is there’s a class for every student.

 In EDGE there is a way to get help in your building that you live in. Professors in EDGE have a way of explaining things and concepts in a whole different way than you’re used to in high school. If you do need any help they try to explain in a different way and adjust to your learning style so that way you can understand and comprehend the material and they go out of their way to help you to make sure you succeed.

In EDGE it’s a really good way to get to know people from all over the world that go to school with you on campus. EDGE Residential College stands for education for global engagement and with the global engagement theme there is a way for students to be open-minded and to learn about worldly cultures and to continue to want to learn.

Academic Vitality in EDGE Residential College is very important for your future successes. I feel EDGE Residential College is a way for students to want to learn about the world in different cultures and aspects of different ways of life and using academic vitality is one way to want to continue to learn and be open-minded about the world at UCA.

I am Kirsten.  They classify me as a freshman, whatever that means, and tell me that I am a member of the residential college, EDGE. What does this mean? It means I live with one of my professors and the members of my class and my other professors come to my dorm for class.

Sounds cool right?

It totally is when your alarm clock didn’t go off and you have two minutes to get to class. Running down the stairs in my pajamas and making it to class on time feels like an epic win.

I am just about to finish my first year of college. Exciting right? Only somewhat when you know, like I do, that you have about eight more years to go. That doctorate seems a long way off right now, but baby steps are what will get me there. These baby steps don’t feel very baby at the time. They are long hard weeks of long hard essays.

How do you get through these torturous essays?

The answer is something I never would have come up with without the wonderful classroom and Learning Assistants (known as LA’s, they have a fancy name, but they are really just tutors) in my residential college.  The classroom isn’t the most prestigious. To be honest it is a long rectangle that if you are sitting in the back you might think your professor is about a mile away.

The LAs seemed a little scary and unapproachable for the first few weeks, but after you watch your “superiors” wander to the kitchen in their pajamas a few times the new wears off.

SO back onto topic, how I learned to write an essay. I was sitting on top of one of the desks in the classroom, because I am a rebel.  I was complaining, like I always seem to be doing, about how I had no idea where to start on my essay.

A guy who has now become a friend of mine stood up and walked to the white board.  “To write an essay you begin with B.S., then you lie, then you B.S. some more. After that you support your B.S. and lies with some facts and finish it up with some more B.S. And you get an A,” As he said this he wrote on the board, which I photographed.

While this is not a good method for actually writing essays it was very humorous. This laughable concept about lying got me writing. This is how I found the true way to write an essay, actually sit down and put words onto the paper, even if they are terrible lies. Because your sloppy words can be edited by your LAs, but an empty page cannot.

Without this humor and help I am not sure if I would have ever started that essay. I have to say that I love all the help and humor that comes from living in EDGE and using the classroom to study. Bouncing ideas off of others is, in my opinion, the best way to keep good insight and good grades.