University of Southern Maine

ARS110 Explorations in Creative and Research Activities

ARS110 is about starting with a topic you are interested in and helping you discover the people and resources available at USM and the Southern Maine region to advance that topic so it becomes an integral part of your college experience. Many students don't discover these opportunities until they are taking advanced classes near the end of college. But the more you build your personal plans and interests into your college education, the more valuable college education will become. By starting the process at the beginning of college, the knowledge and friendships you create may help you become happy in college, help you improve your career planning, and help you graduate.

It is difficult to imagine the diversity of projects that undergraduates pursue at USM. The link to Thinking Matters on the homepage provides some examples. But this is not intended to help you choose a topic. Instead, we hope to help you realize that something you are interested in or passionate about may, in fact, be a wonderful topic to pursue and develop in college. In ARS110, each student will be on the path of pursuing their own unique interests. For example, one of you may be on the way to becoming a chemist, one a painter, one a writer, one a staff member for Habitat for Humanity, and another may get a full-time job planning political campaigns. Together, we will discover that each of you is unique by sharing as you begin to develop your plans for where college will take you. There will many common experiences to share and common resources to discover. A big part of ARS110 is to build academic friendships; not just classmates who happen to become friends, but interesting, engaged collegiate learners, each of whom are going for it in their own, unique way.

The topic you begin to develop in ARS110 might be related to what you might want to major in, or it may have nothing to do with your eventual major. Whatever the topic, there are a variety of valuable resources available to you as a college student, which you can use to your advantage. A big challenge for you will be to identify those resources and find the right people who can give you the best advice. Helping you do that is the main goal for our ARS110 class. For example, one of the main ideas we will introduce you to is that students often connect with a "mentor" who helps advise them. A mentor might be a professor, or it could be a staff member at USM, or it could be someone from the surrounding community. For example, Nan Cumings is a fantastic person who is the director of Portland Trails. Urban trail planning, construction, and maintenance provide a wide variety of possibilities for a college student from urban planning to environmental science and more.

Some things you will do outside of classes in college will be casual while others will be serious, academic activities. Here's an example to help you think about that. Many college students enjoy attending athletic events or playing pick-up games and recreational sports. For most students, their involvement is casual and fun. A few students want to develop their interests in athletics into serious careers and good jobs. For example, they may want to go into sports health or sports management. How would you do that? Is there something you should do in addition to taking the approriate classes? Yes! In ARS110, we want to help you begin to find the answers to that question and begin a transition to include a specific topic in which you are interested as an integral part of your college experience. Here's another example. Let's say you happen to be crazy about birds and are an avid bird watcher. Even if you don't plan to major in science, you can pursue your love of birds in college and use the resources available to you as a college student to have bird watching become a valuable part of your collegiate experience. Maybe you'll connect with the Biology Club or the USM Outing Club. There are a wide variety of student clubs that can complement your interests/hobbies/passions, either in a casual, fun way or in a serious, academic manner or both. ARS110 can help you to connect to possibilities. In some cases, perhaps this may even cause you to change your college plans and career goals. Maybe after graduating from USM, your bird watcher will have lead you to a job working for Adjunct Professor David Evers at his company, Biodiversity Research Institute. Or maybe an interest in birds will develop into research or volunteer work at the Maine Audobon Society at Gilsland Island Farm. Working in an advanced way on something you care about might lead you to receive a strong letter of reference from a coworker or mentor. That might help you get into medical school. Or maybe it'll help you get into business school or a a good job. Perhaps the network of bird watchers you connect with through USM will include a Southern Maine business leader with lots of helpful connections. Again, you are on a unique path and the more inspired you can be by your college experiences, the more valuable they will be for you.