Diversity essay - Topics and ideas

  • Due Mar 26, 2021 by 11:59pm
  • Points 1
  • Submitting a file upload

  

Overview of Diversity Essay

Imagine you have secured your first full-time professional job after college, in your chosen career community.  Your supervisor was impressed by the essay you wrote about new technology last week.  Once again, at 5pm on Friday afternoon, your supervisor forwards you a recent news article, this time about some serious concerns over issues around diversity and inclusion in your field.  "Need your reactions for Monday's staff meeting!"  

Over the course of these assignments, you will write a four-page, double-spaced essay, making an argument about how a particular area of diversity and inclusion currently being discussed in the news might affect some aspect of your prospective career community -- and what to do about it.  

Your argument should not only be descriptive (what you think will happen and why) and normative (whether the consequences will be good or bad), but also advisory (pointing to a possible solution or way forward with the issue). Once again, you must use scholarly concepts and evidence in making your arguments.    

 

Part 1: Topics and ideas. Search the professional news media for articles about three possible diversity/inclusion issues to write about.

 

Steps to follow

1. Decide which news outlets you are going to search.  No matter what your chosen career community, a general, high-quality news source can provide information on new diversity/inclusion issues that might affect your professional work.  Here are some suggestions to get you started (you might want to try a different combination of news sources than you did in your first paper):

  • The New York Times 
  • The Washington Post
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • Bloomberg Businessweek
  • The Atlantic
  • The Economist
  • The New Yorker
  • Scientific American
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Wired Magazine
  • PBS NewsHour
  • NPR News

All of these news outlets have their own web sites that you can search for recent articles, but most of them (except for PBS and NPR) keep their actual article content behind paywalls.  Fortunately, our campus library subscribes to all of these news outlets and more, so you can freely access them.  (Of course, you may also use the news source you chose for your career community.)

You need to search at least two different news sources as part of this assignment.

To find a newspaper or newsmagazine in our library,

  • go to the UW Libraries home page (https://www.library.wisc.edu/)
  • select "Journals" from the "Search for" drop-down menu
  • select "Title" from the search box drop-down menu
  • enter the title of the desired newspaper or newsmangazine
  • click the "Available online" checkbox to ensure that the results you get point to the freely-accessible database of articles from that newspaper or newsmagazine.

Search for journals

Once you have found the database for the particular newspaper or newsmagazine, you can either browse issue-by-issue or use the search tools.  

Need more help?  Here is a custom resource page for more information about using our library databases with this course, put together by senior academic librarian Rebecca Payne: https://lgapi-us.libapps.com/widget_c.php?site_id=124&widget_type=9&output_format=3&widget_embed_type=1&guide_id=979673&page_id=7084503&enable_navigation=1&content_type_id=1&config_id=1599250974505&lti_id=26017&lti_placement_id=1382292

2. Construct a search for each of your news outlets that combines "diversity/inclusion" terms with "career" terms.  Each news outlet will have a different search interface, but they can all retrieve articles based on keywords.  Your challenge is to come up with keywords that might lead to interesting examples of diversity/inclusion issues in your chosen field.  For example: 

  • "gender" and "health care"
  • "first-generation students" and "higher education"
  • "discrimination" and "real estate"
  • "young adults" and "public relations"
  • "rural areas" and "food service"
  • "ethnicity" and "environmental restoration"

Sift through the search results for each of the news outlets you chose.  See if any of the resulting articles seem like they would make interesting topics for your paper.  You will probably need to click into several candidate articles and read them to determine this.

Please note: Your topic must focus on a contemporary diversity/inclusion issue, so you should only consider news articles that have been published within the past five years.

 

3. Pick three possible news articles that you might use as the "seed" for your paper.  For each article, write down the following information:

  • the full citation of the news article, using APA citation format (see this UW Writing Center guide to APA format)
  • the exact search terms you used to find the news article
  • a one-paragraph summary of what the article is about
  • a one-paragraph description about how the article relates to your own career interests and why you think the article might serve as a good paper topic for this course 

It is crucial that your articles are listed in APA format for consistency and clarity.  For example, a newspaper article would be listed this way:

  • Barringer, F. (2019, Sept. 14). Hawaii tries green tools in remaking power grid. The
    New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

A newsmagazine article would be listed this way:

  • Park, A. (2019, Sept. 14). A shot at cancer. Time, 174(10), 32‐39. Retrieved from
    www.time.com/ 

Listing your references correctly now is good practice, and will make it easier to add them to the reference list at the end of your final essay draft if you do end up using them as part of your paper!

4. Turn it in.  Upload to Canvas the document describing the three news articles which are candidate topics for your paper.  

 

Examples

Here are some examples of an online New York Times search of "gender" and "medicine" using the Factiva interface provided by UW-Madison libraries: 

  • "When the Surgeon Is a Mom"
    The New York Times, 31 December 2019, 1987 words, Emma Goldberg, By Emma Goldberg, (English)
    Nearly 40 percent of pregnant surgery residents consider dropping out. Many wonder: Why can't the system accommodate motherhood? As a health care professional, Dr. Erika Rangel is trained to know when things are going wrong. That alarm went ...
    (Document NYTF000020191231efcv0002w)
  • "When Men Praise Their Own Research"
    The New York Times, 18 December 2019, 723 words, By Anupam B. Jena, Marc Lerchenmueller and Olav Sorenson, (English)
    Women do so much less often. And it's not because their work isn't as good. Women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics at the highest levels. Only one out of four full professors at American research ...
    (Document NYTF000020191218efci0003i)
  • "Choosing Medicine's Flexibility for Family's Sake"
    The New York Times, 24 August 2019, 2204 words, Claire Cain Miller, By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, (English)
    Britni Hebert was chief resident, on track for a career in the highly demanding field of oncology, when she found out she was having twins. ''Everything kind of just tilted on its head,'' she said.
    (Document NYTF000020190824ef8o0002w)

Please note: These examples appear above just as they would from the search interface.  You must take the information and reformat it in APA style for this assignment!  Do not simply copy and paste the text from the search interface and turn it in for this assignment!

1616821199 03/26/2021 11:59pm