Prompt 2 - This year our Wake Forest Student Union invited expert students to become teachers of non-credit classes in the Wake Forest Experimental college. Provide us with the title of a course that you could teach your peers. 250 characters
2) Modern History Through Firsthand Accounts. I’ve always found that history through text is limited. The barriers of language make it impossible to capture an event and we’re left with essentially a negative waiting to be developed. The class relies primarily on guest speakers and student interaction. We’ll learn about 9/11 from firefighters. We’ll hear perspectives on the economic collapse from John Allison. We’ll discuss Iraq with military officials. The class will be presented in a non-CNN/FOX/NBC manner, meaning it’s uncensored, meaning it’s real.
Prompt 3 - Make a rational argument for a position you do not personally support. For clarity, please state your true opinion first and then argue the opposite position. 1000 characters
3) F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that genius is marked by the ability to hold two opposing viewpoints. This is essentially what your prompt is asking me to do. This is wrong. Rational presupposes an evaluation of the facts of reality, separate from the judgment being made and the person making it. The subjectivism posed in your question implies something can never be true prior to being judged. This denial of objectivity prevents a rational argument from being made because it means that judgment has no independent existence separate from the mind. Thus the question stated in the prompt makes every argument arbitrary, and groundless. Instead of asking this of applicants, let’s ask another one. While you’re at it, you can even ask yourself. “Make a rational argument for a position you support.” I’ve found that very few people can do this once the question “Why” has been posed. Why is honesty good? Why is killing evil? You’ll learn more about a person from their ability to answer those questions and rationally support them than their ability to counterfeit reason with quasi-rationalism.
Colgate
At Colgate we value global awareness and the diverse perspectives of our students. Through travel, students are able to experience different cultures and take advantage of new opportunities that can make our community richer when they return to campus. If you had the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world during your time at Colgate, where would you go, and why? 250 Words
No country is more appealing to me than Russia. Reading the history and literature of a people described by perhaps it’s most famous author as having a “rudimentary spiritual need…for suffering…everywhere and in everything” lifts us to greater heights than do the tragedies of ancient Greece. They meet life with an unusual vitality of character, able to flux between absolute joy and despair in a matter of minutes. For an outsider, one who’s experienced the Russian sense of life only through literature, it’s fiction brought into the real world. It’s this world I want to immerse myself in, a world in which I hope to experience that heightened sense of emotion that is so uniquely Russian. I want to see life through the eyes of Ivan Karamazov, to think the thoughts of the Underground Man, if only to better understand the human psyche. One, I feel, can’t truly do this until they’ve walked the streets of St. Petersburg, until they’ve experimented in morality like Raskolnikov (naturally not to that extent), and until they’ve shared Vodka with a fellow intellectual over a wooden table in a cold Russian winter. I want to stand where Lenin stood when he called for the most evil political system the world has ever seen and to hear the thunderous applause that greeted it. I want to walk in the forests of Siberia and feel the souls of the millions sent there to die, so I can know what human irrationality is capable of. I want to experience the extreme highs and extreme lows that mark the barometer of Russian culture in order to truly understand the human capacity to feel.
-L.C.
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