The Power of Fire by Adria

The Power of Fire by Adria - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

My first semester of school here at Snow College, I enrolled in the honors program and took my first honors course: Intermediate Composition, or Honors Thesis. Most students, I later learned, waited until their third or fourth semester in the program to take this class. I was not so wise, and previous to the completion of the class, the longest paper I had ever written was three pages. Suddenly I was being asked to write twelve to twenty-five pages. I was incredibly grateful to realize it was on a subject of my choosing, until I realized that meant I had to come up with something to write about on top of doing all the research and work involved.

Thankfully, my professor was very clear in his instructions. He set multiple draft deadlines throughout the semester, along with an annotated bibliography and a synthesis paper to work through our sources. This helped me to narrow my focus from simply writing on J.R.R. Tolkein’s "The Lord of the Rings"; exploring the symbolism of fire within the series became my clear goal. Without this, I probably wouldn't have done anything until the week of, and that would not have been enough time. He also made sure every student in the class had a chance to work with a mentor in their subject area to help format and organize the ideas within the thesis. He was further helpful just by supporting the topics we had chosen, whether he personally agreed with them or not, pointing us towards sources that would both support and refute our arguments. He made sure we got peer reviews and feedback from he and our mentors before turning in the final draft.

It was not until after finishing the paper, a glorious eighteen pages in length, I realized just how useful the project was. Despite beginning the project terribly unprepared, I have since had to write five and six page essays regularly, and the skills I learned while enrolled in the course have been extremely helpful, particularly the ways to find research that we learned and the ideas of meta communication. It is also useful to know that while a long paper can be daunting, I certainly can finish it, and finish it well. Knowing that I have written something longer in the past gives me a huge self-confidence boost. I will always be glad that I decided to take the Honors Thesis course, if only for the friendships I made with other students in the program and the writing skills I learned.