Overview
Gen Ed courses ask you to explore problems that lie "beyond the classroom" through ideas and methods that aren't necessarily familiar to you through your coursework in departments or your concentration. A lot of the time in Gen Ed, these explorations will take place as part of assignments that involve different kinds or combinations of writing for different kinds or combinations of audiences, and the good news here is two-fold: getting more practice communicating across different mediums and audiences is a valuable way to think about translating your coursework into "real-world" settings, and there are concrete strategies for engaging with these assignments—really any writing assignment—that will help you succeed at them, while also getting the most out of them. The key to these strategies involves knowing how:
- Your previous work has prepared you to engage with a wide range of writing assignments
- You can quickly test whether you're on the same page as an assignment prompt about what it's asking you to do, why you're doing it, and what the process of doing it looks like
- You can—and should—reach out to instructors + make use of other campus resources to answer any questions you have about an assignment and get feedback and support throughout the writing process.