During my freshman year at SMCM, I wrote an analysis of how our society thinks about and utilizes zoos and similar institutions for my Environmental Ethics class. The process for writing this work was very challenging for me, in part because my outlook changed several times during the research process, and it forced me to self-reflect on how I thought about writing extensive projects such as these. Writing this paper challenged my perspective on how I think about our relationship to nonhuman nature, and the memory of me working through my own ideas and being exposed to new ones contributed to my learning experience over the course of the class. Ultimately, this paper helped me understand how to synthesize different ideas from different sources into a coherent stance on a subject.
