Reed Paideia Writing Suppliment

Now that the application deadline has passed…care to share what topic you wrote about for your Paideia course? I’m afraid mine wasn’t good enough!

I’m really into death metal, so mine was basically just talking about why I love moshing even though its considered an aggressive form of dance. I’m sure your essay was great! What was it about?

I think since it is such a new topic and there aren’t really any examples of what they are looking for, there’s a lot of anxiety surrounding whether we wrote about the “right thing.” I think that regardless of what you wrote about, they are looking for something unique that shows your personality, and just well-structured, college level writing.

That being said, I’m still pretty scared about my essay too, haha. It seems like most people here took the narrow/narrative approach by focusing on one interest they would teach to the Reed community? I went a bit broader by listing potential Paideia classes and discussing a lot of my interests and how they fit in with Reed’s social life, clubs, student organizations, etc. I organized it a bit more like a “Why Reed?” essay, but left the focus on myself, I guess? Not sure if that is what they were looking for or not though. //sigh

@boulangerie I was thinking about listing different topics of interests too; however, I decided to just focus on one in the end. Yours sounds really good though as you’ve managed to fit in the previous supplement prompt “Why Reed?” into the essay as well as exploring the endless possibilities for Paideia classes.

@Marihorror I actually ended up doing mine on how to make different coffee shop drinks/food as I am a barista for my after school job. Yours sounds really interesting! I’ve actually always been curious to how people enjoying moshing as I’ve never experienced it myself.

I wrote mine about African Americans in philosophy, specifically the philosophical ideas of afropessimism. Haha I brought it up in my interview too so I thought it was a nice tie in

I wrote mine about teaching the basics of many languages, as I am learning Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Italian, & German

That sounds brilliant, BlackMagic! I am sure it was a stand-out!

I wrote about the application of mathematical and scientific principles to the world of reality television. I saw that many of the Paideia offerings by current Reed students weren’t purely academic and range from LARPING to blunt rolling 101, so I just went for it haha

@eebee88 It was definitely interesting to see how different all the Paideia courses were!