Extra Credit Blog

On April 10th, 2013, I attended the Undergraduate Research Writing Conference at the Livingston Student Center. I expected to sit through somewhat boring presentations on topics that did not interest me at all. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Each room had three presentations per session. One of the presentations I witnessed was a young lady who spoke about the overpopulation at Rutgers. I knew a lot of people went to this university, but while I sat and listened to her presentation, I realized, that it is a bigger problem than many students, including myself, even know. The issue of overpopulation not only makes traveling to class on the buses a struggle with how crowded they are, but more classes are being forced to be online, or become hybrid courses because there are not even room in the classrooms for the growing population. She pointed how that the idea of more and more classes becoming hybrid or online classes would upset a lot of students. Many people like sitting in the classroom and being taught by a professor, rather than students teaching themselves materials. I enjoy some of my classes being hybrid, but I am a science major and cannot imagine my chemistry and anatomy classes being online even just once a week. She expressed concern about how this idea of online classes might spread to more and more majors which would lessen the interest of students for that particular major. Also, online classes are hard for those who do not have self-discipline to make sure they complete all their assignments, and on time. Therefore, overpopulation might cause many of those students in online or hybrid classes to have their grades begin to slip. I believe her resolution was to build more lecture halls and to make admission harder. I agree with making admission harder because I personally know a lot of students who find Rutgers a very difficult school, who even have "easier" majors, and are not able to keep up the work load. I'm not saying everyone at this school should have a 4.0 GPA, but I feel as though there are a lot of students who come here just for the social atmosphere due to the fact it is a high ranked "party school". These are the students who may get into this school due to the fact their parents are alumnae, or because they went to an easier high school. Overall, my experience at the conference opened my eyes to ways that I can make my paper more interesting. In fact, it was that week that I re-did my entire research paper and tried to make it more appealing, and more convincing. My paper was very opinion based before I had rewritten it, and now I believe it is more interesting, and factual.