Mahir Shahriar

Dr. Martin
PS 1010
29 April 2016
Reflective Essay
At the beginning of this semester, I was not inclined to take Political Science
course. Politics is not really my thing. As the semester started rolling, I realized it is not
that bad. Lectures were very detailed. One thing that I really liked about lecturer Kevin
Deegan Krause is that he used different similes and metaphors to elaborate the idea of
politics, policy, and structure.
During seminars, we mostly discussed about the readings, and the lectures to
get a better understanding of the topic. The whole course's main focus was to find a
problem that we can take action and solve if possible. After writing our first memo for
seminar, we determined issues that we picked. Doing so made it much easier to find
and develop group looking at similar interests in issues.
Our group consisted of six members. The issue that we examined was the
funding for arts. Art departments not receiving enough funds from government. Schools
are also taking away arts, because they do not feel it is important and necessary to
have. Non profit art organizations trying to help but it turns out to be covering very
limited area. These organizations often are relying on donations, and sometimes, grants
which are not always enough.
Before writing our final essay, we did couple of memos related to the final paper.
It made writing the essay a little easier, because most of the research and basic

information that you need to know was already done in memos. Those memos worked
like drafts to help build the main paper. I do not really plan to continue working on the
problem even though funding for art matters, because I feel that the solutions we
provided is hard to make it work.
Two heads are always better. Group work was not that bad. I do not like the idea
of group work because people sometimes depend on you and tries to put all the burden
on you. Fortunately, everybody in my group split the work evenly and fairly. Having a
group also made it easy to volunteer for our volunteering experience, because not
everybody feels comfortable going to a random site.
Before our final paper, we were required to present our issue in class. It was
more like the summary of the final paper. The final essay paper was not easy for me to
write. Even after memos that we turned in the seminar related to the topic, I had to do
new researches and write my portion of the essay. I spent two days writing 3 and a half
pages because the things that I could talk about were so limited. I had to focus on the
direct action that we could take to solve the issue.
The importance of politics was something that I have never thought about.
Politics shape how our society works. Keeping this in mind, I feel that it will help me with
decision making in the future and help me get involved in issues that I care about in
order to make a difference.