CLAIRE LONGCORE

I spent several tens of thousands of dollars to get here. Was it worth it? This portfolio is a collection of the eclectic coursework, temporary extracurriculars, and mostly a history of me: my thought processes, my naive idealism, and the sheer amount of planning college takes.

 

I’ve presented my college life year-by-year for purposes of representing over time the growing interconnectivity of my courses. I am pursuing degrees in history and economics with a minor in data science. Though different on the surface, I’ve found that these classes spiral through each other; my understanding of history is shaped by the economic systems in place at the time, and vice versa, with both shaped by how much we know and who gets to control that narrative based on what gets recorded. My data classes always loop back to ethics in new ways and caution treating information as a neutral, which applies in the modern day to code but reiterates again my multitude of social sciences courses, especially those on historiography, that discuss source bias and what the ‘truth’ is. 

 

My first year is broad and undiscerning, with many threads that go nowhere and a lot that I thought went nowhere and ended up integrated when I revisited them later on. Over time, in more advanced classes, I reconsider these introductory classes and build on their foundations, sometimes bringing back the same data in new contexts. 

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Look for this spiral and the connections between earlier and later work, with the author (yours truly) growing alongside them. Time progresses linearly, as does this portfolio, but that doesn’t mean you can’t revisit memories from the earlier times with the knowledge of the present. 

 

As you read this portfolio, with that in mind, I want you to ask yourself if you think this college experience was worth it. I hope you agree with me that it was. My classes weren’t about writing papers and doing math; they were about learning how to express myself, gaining appreciation for other disciplines and their ways of knowing, reading critically and comparatively, and building ways to see interconnections between all of my knowledge.