and we’re holding these presentations to 15 minutes on very big topics. And this will be a crucial ingredient in your professional success, to be able to say something big and complicated simply and very quickly. Not to mention be able to field questions. And there’s a term paper, as you know. We take those papers very seriously and one reason we do is that in past years they haven’t been so good. So every year we tighten up a little bit and we are harsher in our assessment and we are expecting a preliminary outline of what you are going to write about by February 10, and when I say preliminary outline it’s at least a page, but that page has to be crystal clear what is the – argument that you’re making and what are you going to use to substantiate it. These papers are not a book report; you’re taking a position on something. And the syllabus has a bunch of topics, any of those is fine. If you want a different topic, you have to get an okay from me or Steve. By all means, pick a different topic, but what we don’t want you to do is to pick one and we don’t know, we haven’t approved it before this outline because every once in a while a student will take a topic that it may be very interesting and have absolutely nothing to do with the course. So we’re trying to avoid that. We’re taking 2 maybe 3 trips to New York and a week-long trip to Washington. They’re almost all set; I think they’re going to be really interesting. And the one thing I want to mention so there are no surprises is that you’re going to have background on everyone we’re going to see. But for every meeting we’re going to have 4 students who are going to be assigned the responsibility of asking a question. And the meetings will
and we’re holding these presentations to 15 minutes on very big topics. And this will be a crucial ingredient in your professional success, to be able to say something big and complicated simply and very quickly. Not to mention be able to field questions. And there’s a term paper, as you know. We take those papers very seriously and one reason we do is that in past years they haven’t been so good. So every year we tighten up a little bit and we are harsher in our assessment and we are expecting a preliminary outline of what you are going to write about by February 10, and when I say preliminary outline it’s at least a page, but that page has to be crystal clear – what is the argument that you’re making and what are you going to use to substantiate it. These papers are not a book report; you’re taking a position on something. And the syllabus has a bunch of topics, any of those is fine. If you want a different topic, you have to get an okay from me or Steve. By all means, pick a different topic, but what we don’t want you to do is to pick one and we don’t know, we haven’t approved it before this outline because every once in a while a student will take a topic that it may be very interesting and have absolutely nothing to do with the course. So we’re trying to avoid that. We’re taking 2 maybe 3 trips to New York and a week-long trip to Washington. They’re almost all set; I think they’re going to be really interesting. And the one thing I want to mention so there are no surprises is that you’re going to have background on everyone we’re going to see. But for every meeting we’re going to have 4 students who are going to be assigned the responsibility of asking a question. And the meetings will
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