Reflecting on Academic Partnership and My Journey Within INTD-105.

 “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.” This is the epigraph that set the initial connections between Octavia Blake’s Bloodchild and us students in INTD-105. When I first began my course in INTD-105, I expanded my knowledge and applications of such through my goal setting essay. After not even delving too deep into the class, I already was having to speak about the partnerships I was about to be having with Professor McCoy, my classmates, and even more so, the partnerships that Professor McCoy would choose to bring into the light. As I stated in my goal setting essay, myself and thousands of other students have embarked on numerous kinds of partnerships since the day they have applied to SUNY Geneseo, but many of them have not even realized it.

The epigraph from Bloodchild forms a through line for the conversations we have had this semester, especially since we’ve have had to frequently relate the book to our own establishments of partnership. Through our discussions as a class, we have analyzed the different risks and rewards within a partnership, having to identify them, elaborate on them, and reflect on them. On the first day of class in INTD-105, we, as a class, looked at the syllabus and talked in groups about what it was going to mean for our class, and that was just the start of our reflective journey.

To begin to reflect, we first had to be given information. Professor McCoy had carefully selected three guest speakers who are a part of SUNY Geneseo to aid us in the initiation of our reflective learning process. Through verbal conversation, we had the ability to ask these speakers questions, throwing “what-if” scenarios at them in order to gain a better understanding of the risks and rewards of their partnerships in order to better understand our own. From the outside looking in, we do not see every process gone through within a partnership. But these processes are important, as they can unknowingly affect us. In saying this, our guest speakers frequently touched on the topic of knowing and unknowing consent, and what that means in a partnership setting. For instance, our guest speaker Joe Cope, the Associate Provost for Student Success, introduced to us the idea of a college syllabus as a form of contract. With a syllabus, a partnership between a student and a professor is made. By comparing a syllabus to a contract, Joe was able to initiate us to think about the kinds of risks and rewards this type of partnership could hold. By being a student, you do not have the consent to what does and does not go into the syllabus, but that itself just serves as a risk in that kind of partnership. Even though this risk exists, there is still the found reward that you have all the terms of the partnership laid out in front of you, in which even the professor must oblige by. Another example of unknowing consent was brought to our attention by robbie routenberg, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. During our discussion, robbie had brought up the various plays that students must watch during freshman orientation, which teach about the dangers that could occur at a college campus. To watch these plays, SUNY Geneseo does not receive consent from the freshman students to perform them. Instead, this is just another example of accepting the terms of a partnership to engage in them. Our third guest speaker, Dr. Sasha Eloi-Evans, the Director of Multicultural Programs and Services, had spoken about knowing consent within bias-related incidents. When she gets informed of a bias-related incident, in order to have a meeting with the students, she has to first gain the consent of the accused and the victim to continue. She has to gain consent to both parties because if the accused was actually being biased and hateful, and they do not consent to the restorative justice conversation, it leaves room for the victim to become more upset if the accused does not take the conversation seriously. The possibility of these situations told by Sasha is different than the situations told by the other two guest speakers, in that they are allowed upfront consent before even beginning their partnership. Even so, the option for consent coming from both parties makes them aware of their risks and/or rewards, and if they accept, they also accept the terms just as students do with their professors in class and during freshman orientation.

Above I have spoken about different kinds of consent: consent in which you are formally saying that you will engage, and consent in which you indirectly accept the terms of a partnership. In both instances, you are accepting risks and rewards that affect you. Accepting risks is a revolving idea that has emerged from these speakers, and I find that idea reinforced in the class’ epigraph as well. From my own personal experiences from INTD-105 and through connections from the epigraph, I was able to identify the partnership between Gan and T’Gatoi, and find parallels between their acceptance with one another and the acceptance I give in my own partnerships.

Reflecting upon what you learn gives the material you learn purpose. If you are knowledgeable about something, why is that important? If your knowledge cannot be applied, what is the point of it? I am asking these questions because that is what this class has taught me to do. INTD-105 has challenged me to discover the importance of all my ideas in my writing, and to write everything with a purpose behind it. The constant asking and answering of “so what?” and putting my thoughts into the reflective cycle has resulted in many improvements within my writing, and the intricate feedback given to me to make revisions has made writing each time a bit easier, as I learned from my past mistakes. To be well-rounded and thoughtful shows your true understanding of the world, therefore, I fully support GLOBE’s insistence on Geneseo students reflecting upon their learning, as I have first-hand experienced a positive outcome from it.

The Evident Success of Academic Partnership Through Integrative Learning

The rewards for partnerships that are made within integrative learning may seem hidden, but they do exist, as integrative learning allows for students to potentially become more well-rounded individuals. As the Association of American Colleges & Universities defines it, integrated learning is “an understanding…that a student builds across the curriculum…from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus.” In other words, integrative learning is an in-depth learning process that applies its lessons directly towards real-world experiences, using self-reflection as a primary tool for learning and discovering. This process has specifically occurred through the informational sessions within INTD-105 (the Risks and Rewards of Academic Partnership) about SUNY Geneseo’s facilities and the connections being made to Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild. From these two, we can make strong connections from the many meaningful partnerships that they hold, which is done through the successful process of integrative learning.

Integrative learning has very much to do with the processes I have been engaging in within INTD-105. At SUNY Geneseo, there is no course offered to learn about the inner workings of the college’s facilities such as the heating plant. Therefore, the closest that we will most likely ever get to learn about them would be through a class such as this. By being exposed to these facilities through this course, we are able to see the moving parts of the campus and realize that there is more to its structure than just going to class and meeting with professors, because while colleges could not run without professors, there are many other factors that play into its success as well. When I first came to Geneseo for a tour, the tour guide pointed the heating plant out to us, so I’ve noticed it since before I even actually started going here. As the site that corresponds with the heating plant states, it is responsible for the central heating plant, campus satellite boiler system, energy consumption, and the conservation and upkeep of utility distribution systems. In simpler terms, this means that they provide the campus with hot water, heat, natural gas, and steam. The role of the staff at the campus heating plant is crucial to the academic partnership we have all embarked on because without it, all the students in the residence halls would not have heat or hot water to shower, wash dishes, do laundry, and many other daily activities. The SUNY Geneseo facilities workers also contribute to our course’s values of academic partnership because as stated a video about Geneseo’s facilities, there is lot of room for growth and learning in all the jobs that they have. As Karen Rockhill states, she started as just a custodian, and now she is the head custodial supervisor. Rick Canarvis also talks about how he started as just a custodian and worked his way up until one day, his boss asked if he would like to learn about being a locksmith. Now, he works as a locksmith on campus. The jobs in facilities are ones that you can climb the ladder towards as long as the workers are willing to take the risk of learning something new to be able to gain the reward of a promotion. This process is similar to the growth we can take as students. Starting out as a freshman student, we then climb the ladder every year by taking more classes and becoming more informed and experienced, which can eventually lead to our success.

Integrative learning was especially shown through the reflections having to be made through the book, Bloodchild, that we are required to read. Textbooks and novels are already part of general coursework for most classes, but in this specific class, we have been delving deeper into them by discovering sections from the book that connect to our own lives and the world around us that we would have never thought to have noticed before. All these discoveries thus far have been found through a process of self-reflection, which plays heavily into the role of integrative learning. An example of such reflections would be through making connections between Bloodchild and the SUNY Geneseo heating plant. The connection between the characters in Bloodchild and the facilities/heating plant at Geneseo lies within their goals and intentions. In Bloodchild, T’Gatoi performs transplant procedures on Terrans, but it is not something that she has to do. The eggs inside the Terrans could very easily eat them from the inside out, yet T’Gatoi and others like her instead perform a surgery so that the Terrans can have a chance of living and being able to help raise the child as a family. T’Gatoi’s care is also shown through the fact that she provides Gan’s family with sterile eggs for them to stay young and healthy, and even through fact that Gan was caged within T’Gatoi’s limbs within three minutes of his birth, which is something she does to make others feel safe. This concern for health and safety can also be seen through SUNY Geneseo’s facilities. The heating plants at Geneseo keep the college running smoothly, as many students would not be able to attend without a place to live, and without the heating plant, there would be no place to live. The facilities’ care is also shown through the fact that they are present twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in the event that something goes wrong with their services. Overall, both the heating plant and Tlic like T’Gatoi aim to keep everyone alive. T’Gatoi does this so that families are able to stay together and reproduce so their species continues to exist, while the heating plant provides services that keep students warm and ensures their ability to stay on-campus living a healthy life.

Through the meaningful partnerships in both SUNY Geneseo’s facilities and the characters in Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, myself and other students in INTD-105 are able to make connections between themselves and the two, the world around them and the two, and the two themselves. Of course, all would not have been made possible without the process of integrative learning, which has gone above and beyond to thoroughly investigate the creative connections that have been made.

Growing up Through Various Means

Some people come from families where they are forced to mature at a very young age. Some obvious examples are not normally practiced in the United States, such as arranged marriages, but there are areas in America that force children to grow up too young, such as families that may not have a responsible parental figure in the house, or families that need more money to survive. Many times, in instances like these, the children of the family are forced to step up and act in adult ways in order to keep themselves alive, especially if there are siblings in the house usually the responsibility falls on the oldest sibling. Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild contends that the pace in which others are forced to travel towards maturity may seem unfair, but giving acceptance towards such inevitable situations, rather than dwelling on it, is what enables others to grow more- and at their own pace. Butler shows this through the main character, Gan, who is forced to grow up too fast within his society.

In Bloodchild, on a planet that is Earth-like but is not Earth, there’s a preservation where humans, called Terrans, live among an alien-like species, the Tlic. The Tlic cannot reproduce on their own, which is why they live together with the Terrans in a partnership. Within this partnership, the Tlic of the household provides protection and sterile eggs, while the Terrans of the house must give up one their own children to be the host for the Tlic eggs. Bloodchild specifically tells the story of the main character, Gan, and his family. Gan was selected before he was even born to be the child that would one day be a host, having his stomach cut open and eggs extracted from his body. Gan was shown diagrams depicting what would happen to him, so he knew what was expected of him. Despite this, Gan still did not fully understand the procedure he was going to go through. Gan soon realized the horrors of the procedure he was going to go through when he decided to help T’Gatoi, a Tlic he became close with, perform the same procedure on someone else. There, he saw firsthand the painfulness of it all. Aiding T’Gatoi in this process that he was soon about to endure himself made him more mature and think in adult ways before he even would have had to. After seeing T’Gatoi take the eggs out of the Terran, Gan took out a contraband rifle, and was going to end his own life to avoid this process being done on himself. When T’Gatoi found him with the gun, she wanted to get rid of the rifle, in fear that Gan would kill her. This is when Gan stated, “…if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner”. This quote shows that Gan has thought through the procedure he is about to have done on himself, and has decided that he will follow through with it as long as T’Gatoi accepts the risk of having the rifle stay in the house, just as Gan is accepting the risk of pain while hosting T’Gatoi’s eggs. Even though Gan seeing the procedure on someone else was not supposed to happen, he learned from it and came out more mature in the end as he  was able to evaluate the risks of his partnership.

The process of learning and then maturing is one that many college students can relate to. The day that students apply to SUNY Geneso, they must start abiding by the code of conduct-specifically the portion relating to student conduct. The student conduct documents lay out a list of rules these incoming students must adhere to and come along with consequences if they do not. For some students, they have just turned 18, and this is the first time they are being treated as an adult. The student code of conduct therefore gives them a model for how they should be behaving. Though they may not be considered growing up too young, since they are now technically adults, being on their own and having these guidelines forces them to truly grow into the adults they are already classified as. While most of the rules in the code of conduct includes laws that people generally know they should not break, there are other ones that are more college-based and aim to shape the students into adults such as the category of “disruption of regular college activities”, various forms of “dishonesty”, “theft or abuse of computer resources”, and “incitement of others to commit any of the acts prohibited.” Most of these are not exactly illegal to go against at the state level, but they do aim to shape the students at SUNY Geneseo into adults that are capable of good judgement, which is a positive outcome of student’s awareness of it.

I myself can relate to Gan as I was entering college and having to make big adult decisions when I had just turned 18, and from the standpoint of being a child that had to grow up way too young. Though not every family experiences instances where the children have to act as adults, and most children can live out their childhood at a somewhat normal pace, lots of children in America are forced to give up some aspects of their childhood and teenage years in order to keep the family going. My own case of having to grow up at an early age was not that of an irresponsible parent or a family that was not making enough money. Instead, what forced me to grow up too fast was my mother’s health. Starting when I was only in fourth grade, I was cooking simple meals for my siblings and helping them with homework because my mom had (and continues to have) many health issues, and therefore was frequently in the hospital for months on end. It initially started with just cooking, cleaning, and helping occasionally with homework, but as I got older, during the short periods that my mother was out of the hospital, I then added changing her bandages and preparing her IV bags for her PIC line when she couldn’t eat to the list. Though I didn’t mind helping out- because I knew if my mom could be home she would- and I know my siblings appreciated me stepping up, I was still forced into growing up way too young and forced to do things that other children my age would likely not even know about. Every year, until about tenth grade, I found myself cooking, cleaning, and tutoring more than hanging out with friends or playing games. In a way, I feel like these experiences I had helped me become more mature than people my age even today, which I am thankful for. These experiences also helped me relate Bloodchild back to my own life and college as well. Similar to Gan, I was told about and shown the things I had to do to help my mom out with her bandages, but I didn’t realize how hard it would be to do it all on my own, which is similar to how Gan reflected on his situation after seeing what was going to happen to him.

Though college students are technically already adults, the code of conduct makes sure the students mature into the adults they are labeled as, just as children can mature faster than others due to their circumstances at home, and just as how I was affected regarding my mother’s health. The same process is shown as Gan watches T’Gatoi harvest eggs out of a different Terran. A reoccurring idea that is proved throughout all these examples and is shown through Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild is that some situations in life are inevitable, but your outlook on such situations can determine whether you will continue to linger over your hardships, or learn and grow from them instead.

Growing up through various means

Some people come from families where they are forced to grow at a very young age. Some obvious examples are not normally practiced in the United States, such as arranged marriages, but there are areas in America that force children to grow up too young, such as families that may not have a responsible parental figure in the house, or families that need more money to survive. Many times, in instances like these, the children of the family are forced to step up and act in adult ways in order to keep themselves alive, especially if there are siblings in the house usually the responsibility falls on the oldest sibling. In Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, the main character, Gan, is also forced to grow up too young and act in adult ways, even when he is very unsure of the outcome. I myself can relate to Gan as I was entering college and having to make big adult decisions when I had just turned 18, and from the standpoint of being a child that had to grow up way too young.

In Bloodchild, on a planet that is Earth-like but is not Earth, there’s a preservation where humans, called terrens, live among an alien like species, the tilc. The tilc cannot reproduce on their own, which is why they live together with the terrens in a partnership. Within this partnership, the tilc of the household provides protection and sterile eggs, and the terrens of the house must give one child up to be the host for the tilc eggs. Bloodchild specifically tells the story of the main character, Gan, and his family. Gan was selected before he was even born to be the child that would one day be the host and grew very close to the tilc, T’Gatoi. Gan knew what was expected of him because he was told about it and shown diagrams depicting what would happen to him. Despite this, Gan still did not fully understand the procedure he was going to go through. Gan soon realized the horrors of what he was going to go through when Gan decided to stay and help T’Gatoi perform a procedure and saw firsthand the painfulness of it all. Aiding T’Gatoi in this process that he was soon about to endure himself made him grow up and think in adult ways before he even would have had to. After seeing T’Gatoi take the eggs out of the terren, Gan took out their contraband rifle and was going to end his life to avoid this process being done on himself. When T’Gatoi found him, she wanted to get rid of the rifle which is when Gan stated “…if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner”. This  quote shows that Gan has thought through this process he is about to have done, and has decided that he will follow through with it as long as T’Gatoi accepts the risk of having the rifle stay in the house, just as Gan is accepting the risk of pain while hosting T’Gatoi’s eggs. Even though Gan seeing the procedure on someone else was not supposed to happen, he learned from it and came out more mature.

Though not every family experiences instances where the children have to act as adults, and most children can live out their childhood at a somewhat normal pace, lots of children in America are forced to give up some aspects of their childhood and teenage years in order to keep the family going. My own case of having to grow up at an early age was not that of an irresponsible parent or a family that was not making enough money. Instead, what forced me to grow up too fast was my mother’s health. Starting when I was only in fourth grade, I was cooking simple meals for my siblings and helping them with homework because my mom had (and continues to have) many health issues, and therefore was frequently in the hospital for months on end. It initially started with just cooking, cleaning, and helping occasionally with homework, but as I got older, during the short periods that my mother was out of the hospital, I then added changing her bandages and preparing her IV bags for her PIC line when she couldn’t eat to the list. Though I didn’t mind helping out- because I knew if my mom could be home she would- and I know my siblings appreciated me stepping up, I was still forced into growing up way too young and forced to things that other children my age would likely not even know about. Every year, until about tenth grade, I found myself cooking, cleaning, and tutoring more than hanging out with friends or playing games. In a way, I feel like these experiences I had helped me be more mature than people my age even today, which I am thankful for. These experiences also help me relate bloodchild back to my own life and college as well. Similar to Gan, I was told about and shown the things I had to do to help my mom out with her bandages, but I didn’t realize how hard it would be to do it all on my own, which is similar to how Gan reflected on his situation after seeing what was going to happen to him.

The process of learning and then maturing is one that many college students can relate to. The day that students apply to SUNY Geneso, they must start abiding by the code of conduct-specifically the portion relating to student conduct. The student conduct documents lay out a list of rules these incoming students must adhere to and come along with consequences if they do not. For some students, they have just turned 18 and this is the first time they are being treated as an adult. The student code of conduct therefore gives them a model for how they should be behaving. Though they may not be considered growing up too young since they are now technically adults, being on their own and having these guidelines forces them to truly grow into the adults they are already classified as. While most of the rules in the code of conduct includes laws that people generally know they should not break, there are other ones that are more college-based and aim to shape the students into adults such as the category of “disruption of regular college activities”, various forms of “dishonesty”, “theft or abuse or computer resources”, and “incitement of others to commit any of the acts prohibited.” Most of these are not exactly illegal to go against at the state level, but they do aim to shape the students at SUNY Geneseo into adults that capable of good judgement, which is a positive outcome of student’s awareness of it.

Though college students are technically already adults, the code of conduct makes sure the students mature into the adults they are labeled as, just as children can mature faster than others due to their circumstances at home, and just as how I was affected regarding my mother’s health. The same process is shown as Gan watches T’Gatoi harvest eggs out of a different terren. A reoccurring idea that is proved throughout all these examples are that some situations in life are inevitable. Although the pace in which others like Gan are forced to travel towards maturity may seem unfair, giving acceptance towards such inevitable situations, rather than dwelling on it, is what enables others to grow more- and at their own pace.

Engaging in Academic Partnership

Partnership exists everywhere- whether it be a partner for group work, your relationship as a student with an educator, or your relationships with your boss and coworkers. What comes from the various partnerships in life? As Gan says to T’Gatoi in Bloodchild, “There is risk…in dealing with a partner.” Though there is risk to dealing with partners, I feel there are also many rewards. When dealing with partners of any type, you are offered a look into their mind and their own points of view. As a result, you may learn something from a perspective you’ve never encountered before. As stated by Professor Beth McCoy in her syllabus, I will be witnessing many different perspectives of administrators from Geneseo and the SUNY system. Engaging in these partnerships will help me to fully understand all that goes into this partnership between myself and this college and the partnerships between all the people that make this college run.

The first partnership I made in this course was the partnership between Professor McCoy and myself. At first, I didn’t see my relationship with Professor McCoy as a partnership, but after some class discussion I had realized that it is a partnership of a different form in which I have never thought about with my professors. Professor McCoy does things very differently than any professor I have had so far. For example, during class, we always sit in a circle which gives me the feeling that we are all working together instead of separately, which is how lecture-style classrooms make me feel. Professor McCoy also knows each of us by name and made it a point to make sure she knew our names as close to the start of classes as possible. This shows me a huge sense of partnership because in most of my classes they would only potentially get to learn my name if I was constantly at office hours- the setting of the classroom didn’t allow the professors to truly know anyone. Given the small class size, and the fact that Professor McCoy knows everyone’s name, I am more engaged in this partnership as well. For instance, if I am not going to be in class, Professor McCoy would notice- so I would email her in advance- whereas in my previous classes, the professors would have no idea if I showed up or not. When doing small group work, Professor McCoy engages with each small group individually which strengthens that partnership even more because even during class time, she ensures every student is heard. Given the nature of this course and partnership itself, I think that this course will be constantly focused around what we both are going to need to give to engage in this partnership most successfully. If I am not in class to partake in my portion of the partnership, then there truly is not a partnership to be had. I feel as though the small class size makes it easier for it to feel more like a partnership, but I also want to challenge myself to see aspects of partnership in all my courses this semester.

The partnership with Professor McCoy is not the only partnership I’ve embarked on the since first day I came to this course. The other partnership that I was engaged in right from the start was with the other students. On the first day when Professor McCoy was learning our names, she also had volunteers go around and say everyone’s names and continued to do this every class period until we knew each other’s names. This sparked the partnership between all of us as students because knowing each other’s names, at least for myself, led to me being more able to engage with them in discussion and see things from their perspective, which I feel  is one of the rewards of this partnership. Knowing everyone’s name also made small group work easier, because if I went into a small group not knowing anything about anyone, I would not be as likely to engage or debate their reasoning. Though knowing everyone’s name makes it easier and more rewarding in this partnership, I feel as though there may be more risks with this partnership than that with Professor McCoy, especially because, as stated in the syllabus, there will be a collaborative essay where, “In small groups…[I] will spend four class periods crafting a collaborative essay based on our heating plant tour…”. Given that the group I am in will have class time to complete the essay alleviates some of the risk, but not all. There is always the risk that a partner in the group will not complete their portion of the work. One of my goals is to not be the partner that risks a poor grade for everyone else. Another goal of mine would be to potentially help another partner if they are stuck so they do not become the risk as well.  Though the collaborative essay may be the only graded portion of this partnership, every day in class, this partnership becomes more and more active as l learn through the other students and see things from their perspectives.

              There is one type of partnership that I will never know the true inner workings of, but it is still notable. This is the partnership between Professor McCoy and the administrators of SUNY Geneseo. Though I will not understand Professor McCoy’s partnership with administration, I can relate it to some experiences I have had in different jobs and how different roles work together for one common goal. Professor McCoy has a partnership with all the administrators in some level, but there are some that she may have a closer partnership to or ones that are so important that she is bringing them into partnership with myself and the other students. Professor McCoy states in the syllabus that various administrators will be coming into class to discuss “…how various forms of consent inform their work.” Such administrators include: robbie routenberg, the Chief Diversity Officer, Dr. Joe Cope, the Interim Associate Provost for Student Success, Dr. Sasha Eloi-Evans, the Director of Multicultural Programs and Services, and Seth Gilbertson, the Associate Counsel for SUNY’s Office of University Council. Professor McCoy takes two weeks of her instructional time to have administrators come in and discuss how consent influences their work, and this shows that it is very important that I am able to engage in partnerships with not only all administration but these administrators especially, but also that consent is a very important part of the partnerships I will be engaging in. This raises the question for me of how far am I going to get into these partnerships within this semester and also how far into the partnerships will I get into by the time I graduate, since without even realizing it I have been engaged in these partnerships from the day I applied to Geneseo? What administrators will I have the best partnership with? This whole semester I would like to think about how many partnerships I have within this college and how much each one influenced or will influence my career at Geneseo.

              I have never seen my relationships with educators or administration or anyone of authority over me as a partnership. Throughout this semester, I would like to challenge that portion of my thinking because a partnership can mean very different things and work in many ways. I engage in partnerships every day, and I have never thought to notice them in that way. Some of the partnerships I engage in that I don’t currently see as partnerships may have been or will be the best partnerships of my life. Just from the beginning of this class my partnership with Professor McCoy and the other students in my course has changed how I think about everything that goes into running this college and partnerships in general, and I want to be able to watch these partnerships grow and evolve throughout the semester while also forming partnerships with new people.   

Engaging in Academic Partnership

Partnership exists everywhere- whether it be a partner for group work, your relationship as a student with an educator, or your relationships with your boss and coworkers. What comes from the various partnerships in life? As Gan says to T’Gatoi in Bloodchild, “There is risk…in dealing with a partner.” Though there is risk to dealing with partners, I feel there is also many rewards. When dealing with partners of any type, you are offered a look into their mind and their own points of view. As a result, you may learn something from a perspective you’ve never encountered before. As stated by Professor Beth McCoy in her syllabus, I will be witnessing many different perspectives of administrators from Geneseo and the SUNY system. Engaging in these partnerships will help me to fully understand all that goes into this partnership between myself and this college and the partnerships between all the people that make this college run.

              The first partnership I made in this course was the partnership between Professor Beth McCoy and myself. At first, I didn’t see my relationship with Professor Beth McCoy as a partnership, but after class discussions I had realized that it is a partnership of a different form in which I have never thought about with my professors. This gets me thinking about how this course may be different from any other course I have taken, given how engaged Professor Beth McCoy is with all the students and how it her relationship with the class has been referred to as a partnership. Given the nature of this course and partnership itself, I think that this course will be constantly focused around what we both are going to need to give to engage in this partnership most successfully. I would like to explore what exactly Professor Beth McCoy does differently than any other professor to make it seem more like a partnership, even though it is already a partnership no matter what course I am taking. If I am not in class to partake in my portion of the partnership, then there truly is not a partnership to be had. I feel as though the small class size makes it easier for it to feel more like a partnership, but I also want to challenge myself to see aspects of partnership in all my courses this semester. The partnership with Professor Beth McCoy is not the only partnership I embarked on the first day I came to this course. The other partnership that I was engaged in right from the start was with the other students. I feel as though there may be more risks with that partnership, because we do have a collaborative essay that we will have to complete together. Given that the group I am in will have class time to complete the essay alleviates some of the risk, but not all. There is always the risk that a partner in the group will not complete their portion of the work. One of my goals is to not be the partner that risks a poor grade for everyone else. Another goal of mine would be to potentially help another partner if they are stuck so they do not become the risk as well.  Though the collaborative essay may be the only graded portion of this partnership, every day in class, this partnership becomes more and more active as l learn through the other students and see things from their perspectives.

              There is one type of partnership that I will never know the true inner workings of, but it is still notable. This is the partnership between Professor Beth McCoy and the administrators of SUNY Geneseo. Though I will not understand Professor Beth McCoy’s partnership with administration, I can relate it to some experiences I have had in different jobs and how different roles work together for one common goal. Professor Beth McCoy has a partnership with all the administrators in some level, but there are some that she may have a closer partnership to or ones that are so important that she is bringing them into partnership with myself and the other students. Professor Beth McCoy states in the syllabus that I will be listening to four different administrators from various roles which engages myself and the other students into the partnership Professor Beth McCoy already has with them. Having four separate days that administrators are coming in shows how important it is that I can engage in the partnerships with administration. This raises the question for me of how far am I going to get into these partnerships within this semester and also how far into the partnerships will I get into by the time I graduate, since without even realizing it I have been engaged in these partnerships from the day I applied to Geneseo? What administrators will I have the best partnership with? This whole semester I would like to think about how many partnerships I have within this college and how much each one influenced or will influence my career at Geneseo.

              I have never seen my relationships with educators or administration or anyone of authority over me as a partnership. Throughout this semester, I would like to challenge that portion of my thinking because a partnership can mean very different things and works in many ways. I engage in partnerships every day, and I have never thought to notice them in that way. Some of the partnerships I engage in that I don’t currently see as partnerships may have been or will be the best partnerships of my life. Just from the first two weeks of this class my partnership with Professor Beth McCoy and the other students in my course has changed how I think about everything that goes into running this college and partnerships in general, and I want to be able to watch these partnerships grow and evolve throughout the semester while also forming partnerships with new people.