The Assignment (Project 3)  

Yes, it's a topic of your own choosing--and that can be daunting, so look at the list of suggestions. But here's the parameter: The topic needs to be something you don't know about already. Unfamiliar. Perhaps scarily unfamiliar.

Consider investigating a current event...something you mentally shut out when it comes on the news...and becoming an expert on it.  What is going on in Afghanistan?  Why are people hungry in Darfur?  Is there any way that America will once again have a thriving auto industry? What are those TARP funds supposed to do?  Will there be positions available in your chosen field when you graduate in one, two, three years?  How can you become a successful investor in stocks/bonds/equities today? Will it benefit Chicago to host an Olympics?

For this paper, you will need to present a variety of positions/points of view/possibilities concerning your topic. What does an expert say? What does a person involved in the [______] say?  How is popular media discussing it?  What about the people you know? How has it been seen historically?  (As always, you are "driving the bus". A good structure might be the story of your research: What you started out wondering, what you thought, what early research dug up, what contradictory ideas arose, what confused you, what else you considered, what evidence was even more confusing, where you got stuck, what seems like a reasonable analysis.)

To get exposure to carious ways of seeing your topic,  you need to include cited information from at least one of EACH of these types of sources:

Books

magazines and periodicals (online versions are OK, but they must exist as print versions too. )

reputable reference books or websites (NOT Wikipedia or blog)

scholarly article (from academic  peer-reviewed journal)