Write a personal essay. Your inspiration or starting point is something that happened to you while taking this course or an experience you had during this very busy semester (your story doesn't necessarily have to focus on school). Use your creative writing skills to set the scene or describe the experience - you might want to start in media res, or by recounting or describing the story as if you were still in the middle of it. From there, you want to move from the specifics of the story out to explore some of the issues it raised. You can use "I" throughout the essay, but you may still want to incorporate some research and use APA citations and references, and you may find that at certain points you take the focus off yourself to put more of the focus on the situation or issues you are describing. Spend some time thinking about how to structure this little piece of writing - ideally, your conclusion should wrap right back to the point raised or the situation described in the introduction, ending with a witty or striking comment. Your body paragraphs should explore different aspects of the idea you are discussing, just like a regular essay. Do what you can to make this little essay stick in the memories of your readers. You want to write it in a way that it expands their horizons or teaches them a lesson of some sort through relating to your experience. Incorporating elements of humour and strong writing techniques will help with this. Have some fun with this part of the assignment, and use some creativity to get your points across in an interesting way! What is a personal essay? Blog posts and magazine articles often present personal essays, where the personal experience of the author is introduced in the hook at the beginning. Usually, these personal essays use personal stories, humour, and entertaining examples as a jumping off point to explore some bigger, broader issues that might interest readers, relate to their concerns, provide solutions to common problems, or make them look at the issue from a new perspective. You guys read personal essays all the time, and we've already written some examples of personal reflective essays for class, but I've linked to a variety of examples here in case you want to get a better understanding of the genre before you start writing: The Notting Hill Carnival o A Trip to Senegal Nudity in German Culture (don't worry, this one is strictly PG!) Drawing every Day o iPad Drawing