In this moment, as I find myself on the brink of transition from my undergraduate studies into my postgraduate endeavors, I find my conscious drift back and forth between reflection on my experience to date, and contemplation of what awaits. As I reach this milestone, I am challenged with the task of creating a thesis that not only projects what I have learned and how I have grown in my time at Barrett, the Honors College, but how I will continue to grow and impact the world into which I set out. This growth, subtle yet constant permeates my collegiate experience. I have grown in knowledge, experience, and maturity. I am more self-aware yet working to become less self-conscious, and more selfless. I have made lasting memories I wish I could relive and reckless mistakes I wish I could forget, but both wishes are unavailable, and would be unproductive if granted. I have only grown by being open to new experiences that I may one day cherish and avoiding the pitfalls that have brought forth instances of destruction and despair. I hope to represent this growth in this thesis so that it may serve as a launching pad for me and for those who read it, so that together we can begin to solve the problem I address, a problem that has grown but which we must not allow to grown out of control.

Wisdom on Adulting is a blog created for high school and college students to learn about important aspects of becoming an adult. Specifically, topics that can seem daunting and confusing if tackled without guidance. The adult responsibilities of taking control of one’s finances, personal development, and work life are referred to informally by Millennials and Generation Z as “Adulting”. The blog is educational by nature but designed to be entertaining to read and simple to understand. The goal of the blog is to cover important lessons in a conversational tone and to hopefully help the readers. The tone of the writing emulates a conversation with an older friend, making the topics covered intriguing and actionable. The four main categories that the posts fall into are college, work, finances, and personal development. Many of the articles fit into more than one of the categories as they are meant to build the reader all around as person. Blog format was chosen because it is short form and popular among the target audience who prefer online content over print. In writing this creative project, I referred to successful bloggers for style guidance, tone of writing, and notes on blogging standards. Inspiration for the topics of the posts was gathered from friends and family who fit into the target audience, 18-22 years old.

The act of writing music criticism comes with numerous difficulties inherently involved in describing the ineffable qualities of audio in the medium of the written word. My music criticism podcast, Here and Now with Steve Jozef, offers a method of reviewing albums that sidesteps these problems by interweaving the criticism with clips of the songs discussed. This format holds the critic accountable to root their opinion in tangible components in the music, and makes clear the direct line between the qualities of the music at hand and the reviewer's verdict on that music. I wrote, recorded, edited, and distributed 13 episodes of the podcast over the course of six months; I've selected four of those episodes to represent my work for the purposes of the thesis. Their scripts, as well as links to the full episodes, are included with this paper. In addition, I thoroughly researched modern academic thought on the nature, purpose, and future of popular music criticism. This research helped me refine a conception of my ideal theoretical audience for the podcast, forced me to confront and assess my music evaluation criteria through various lenses, and develop the goal of creating a pattern of empathetic listening amongst my listeners. Over the course of developing the project, I ran into several obstacles in using copyrighted material on the show without permission from the copyright holders. Thus the podcast also became a case study in evaluating modern copyright law and its application, and demonstrating what needs to change about both for music criticism to sustain in this form.

This collection of literary nonfiction essays is lead by the metaphor of cocladogenesis — a unique evolutionary relationship between two lineages that combines coevolution and cospeciation — to suggest that a similar relationship should exist between the subjective and the objective experience, art and science, and the chronicle and the narrative. It is not the singular extreme of either side that results in the advantageously beautiful products of cocladogenesis — it is the constant dialogue between the two factions.

During the transition between high school and college, there is an enormous decline in the number of women who pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Even in the STEM workforce, the gender gap is quite large. This results in a lot of wasted potential and talent that is needed to stay competitive in today's world. This thesis is divided into three parts: identifying a problem, analyzing possible causes, and highlighting various solutions. By using resources such as the Collegeboard, it is apparent that high schools girls over represent in AP and honors math and science classes and achieve just as much as their male counterparts. Due to various causes such as stereotyping, implicit bias, lesser developed spatial skills, lack of confidence, lack of female role models, and uncomfortable work environments, girls are deterred from pursuing STEM majors in college. Of those that do declare a major in STEM, many switch to a non-STEM major by the end of their first year. Even in the workforce, a majority of women in STEM leave midway through their career (after about 10 years). Although there are critics who claim that women do not have the biological ability to succeed in STEM, evidence proves otherwise. The underrepresentation of women in STEM fields has become such a known issue that there have been many recent programs and organizations put in place to encourage young women to pursue STEM. By evaluating the success of these programs and using them as a models, we can reduce the gender gap in STEM fields in the future.

For this project, I have written a trilogy of interrelated short stories. The three stories are entitled "The Blue Bike," "Heartbeat," and "Elevators." Each of these three stories relate to each other both through the featured characters and the core themes. The little girl from the first story, Amy, is the little sister of the narrator Emma from the second story. The narrator from the third story is the son of Charles (Helen's husband) from the first story, who is also a major character in "Elevators." The gym in the second story also appears in the third story. On a thematic and poetic level, I have used the word "lift" as the inspiration behind and connecting thread between my stories. I have played with the various meanings of connotations of the word, using them to construct the plots of each story. For example, I have used it in the sense of face lifts in the first story, as well as alluded to the idea of planes lifting into the air through making Charles a pilot. There is also the idea of lifting a child into your arms, and lifting yourself or someone else up both physically and emotionally. In the second story, I use shop-lifting, weight-lifting, and the idea of giving someone a lift as in giving someone a ride. The idea of giving someone a lift also occurs in the last story, alongside the connotations of lift with elevators. There are a multitude of other instances in which I have tried to make the word "lift" resonate throughout these stories, though the over-arching theme for me would be the idea of lifting other people up. It is the exploration of meaningful connections between people and the way those connections can heal and "lift." This collection is thus an exercise in creative interconnectivity as well as an exploration of the way people can connect meaningfully to each other.