Assignment #2: Intellectual Autobiography

We’ve spent the last four weeks talking about different ways of approaching intellectual questions,
hearing and reading stories of how people came to ask questions in these particular ways, and
mapping out our own intellectual obsessions and preoccupations.
In “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan explains how her doubled relationship to the English language as
illustrated by her relationship with her mother led her to approach her own writing with an eye to
multilingualism. In Whistling Vivaldi, Claude Steele demonstrates how his childhood experiences of
understanding the relationship between race and power shaped the questions he has gone on to ask
in his psychology lab. In Lab Girl, Hope Jahren shows us how the communal environment of a
biology lab and the control offered by an experimental approach emerged from her own
complicated relationships with her parents. In this assignment, I want you to dig into one of your
own approaches and think about its origins in your personal experience.
Another way to think about this is: how and why did you become an expert on something you love
to think about or do? What experience or experiences have driven you to do research in a lab, or to
work as a political activist in your home town, or to write poetry, or to get really good at a sport?
What is the connection between this experience and the work you hope to pursue while you’re here
at Tufts? Choose one or a few experiences and explain to your reader how and why this experience
illustrates your commitment to this topic.
Some questions that might jumpstart your thinking include:

• When did you first realize that you really cared about this topic?
• How does this approach (scientific experimentation, critical analysis of art or literature,
creative writing, etc.) mirror habits of thinking you’ve always had?
• What is your emotional connection to the content of the work you want to focus on in
college?
• What are the Big Questions you most want to answer in the next four years, and what
experiences made you ask those questions?
Your paper should be 1000-1500 words, and use a narrative framework to make an argument about
why what you care about is important—how does this kind of intellectual work improve the world,
how does it improve you, why does it matter?
Rough draft due: Oct. 30
Polished draft due: Nov. 4
Final draft due: Nov. 13