English Senior Integrated Projects
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This collection includes Senior Integrated Projects (SIP's, formerly known as Senior Individualized Projects) completed in the English Department. Abstracts are generally available to the public, but PDF files are available only to current Kalamazoo College students, faculty, and staff. If you are not a current K College student, faculty, or staff member, email us at dspace@kzoo.edu to request access to this material.
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Item How to Crack an Egg : A Memoir Told through Recipes(2023-11-01) Walther, Madison Elisabeth; Smith, Amy L., 1967-Item Maintaining Health in College : A Closer Look at Wellness Resources(2023-11-01) Randel, Ali S.; Heinritz, Marin L., 1976-There are many aspects of wellness. According to the National Library of Medicine, there are eight dimensions of wellness which are physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, vocational, financial, and environmental. For this project, I focused on physical wellness and emotional wellness, which I believe are directly tied to other dimensions on a college campus like social, intellectual, and environmental. This SIP includes three articles: “Services: Nutritious or Disappointing?” ; “Counseling Center Aids Students in Mental Health” ; and “Physical Education Requirement Aids Students in Maintaining Physical Fitness.”Item Orange Juice : Fresh Squeezed A Personal Essay(2024-01-01) Perry, Margaret (Mazey); Heinritz, Marin L., 1976-I wanted to be able to tell a story with layers. This SIP is not just an account of my internship, my breakup, or my depression. It is a story of all of it at once, including moments of joy and happiness because those could not be overlooked. Crafting a non-fiction story with layers that does not explicitly explain the layers was harder than I expected. The key I found, through the help of Dr. Heinritz and Sylvia Plath, is to show and not tell. Show emotion, show conversations and how they made me feel. The research that I did for this SIP was not the conventional kind of research I have done in the past for a history paper or an English essay. This project included a personal experience methodology and more stylistic research when deciding how to structure and write the paper. I used Plath and several personal essays from the New York Times as inspiration for style. I also experimented with different voices when I was in the beginning stages of writing. I wanted the essay to sound professional, but I did not want it to sound academic since it is from my point of view, and I do not often think in academic language. I decided the best way to go about writing was exactly how I thought. I put my thoughts and ideas on the page and made some poetic anecdotes, but I can say with absolute certainty that the way this SIP is written is exactly how my head and voice sound.Item Homebody(2023-11-01) Lipton, Nico; Heinritz, Marin L., 1976-There’s a misconception about transitioning that you have to start before puberty, or you’re too late and none of the changes will take effect the same way. It’s an impossibly small window that so few of us can manage to squeeze through. I was so sick of my own anxieties holding me back from a desire that had felt so impossible and even childish until it stared me in the face, demanding to be seen. I wanted to grow up into the person I was always supposed to become. I wanted to live a life I cared about, no matter what it cost me, more than I’ve ever wanted anything before. I didn’t come to this conclusion one night and completely disregard a near decade of denial. It took several more months of changing, writing, and finally realizing the only thing holding me back was me. When I finally pulled the trigger and began writing my way through each new, mundane experience that this second puberty has brought me, my deep-seeded desire to become something, to make something of myself, slowly peeled back and revealed itself to me. I don’t know if I can call this collection my “big break.” I don’t know who will read it, who will even care, but it doesn’t really matter. I care, for possibly the first time in my life, about every detail of the story. I don’t want to skip to the end because there is no end in sight, not yet. I spent so many years running from who I was turning into that I never had the chance to ask her where she was headed. I know now, and I wish I could’ve told her. She was running home to me.Item Novisimo(2023-08-31) Pimentel, Isabella; Salinas, Shanna, 1975-Introducing this collection of poems and prose, the author writes “I have come to see my project not only as a capstone of what I have learned throughout my time as an English major at Kalamazoo College, but also as the product of what I have learned about myself and further internal reflection. Hence the primary title of my project being “Novísimo,” to emphasize just how new and fresh these feelings always are whenever I find myself living between two worlds. These two communities, however, both foster different senses of belonging and isolation at the same time. When I’m back home in California, I find myself being comforted by the place where I grew up, where I have known the people there my entire life who have also known me for as long as they can remember. When these people who I have spent decades with know so much about me, it is difficult to show and tell them about a change that they might not understand. In that sense, that is where community in Kalamazoo also becomes a comfort as well, where I have peers who have similar experiences and are able to express themselves much more freely and away from home, much like I have. The heart of my works reflects on the feelings that come from being split between two places, such as: homesickness, lovesickness, anger, and a sadness that yearns for the way things used to be. These sentiments are often universal, but through these shared experiences I hope they reach and resonate with many.”