FOREWORD You may remember being asked to write an Orientation Essay at the beginning of your time at Evergreen. You were provided with two prompts to choose from, which essentially boiled down to “reflect on your past and what brought you to this point in your education” or “reflect on your future and where your education could take you.” This assignment is the first of many reflective writing processes asked of Evergreen students. When I first started at Evergreen, I did not understand how fundamental the process of reflective writing would be for my education. I approached the Orientation Essay how I approached every assignment at the time: just get it done the way it’s supposed to be done. It had not occurred to me that no one cared exactly what I wrote. I wrote the Orientation Essay because I was told to do so, not understanding that the process of reflective writing was setting me up to be engaged in and accountable for my education. Writing the Orientation Essay was a process ultimately designed to serve me. Now, as I begin my final year, I am looking back at my younger self for clarity and realizing that, while all these years have felt like grappling in the dark, I have had intentionality in my education. I conceptualize my education as a blackberry bush. I started out with a small root system that over time has expanded and changed. Branches die, and new ones grow out. Sometimes, the plant fruits. The brambles appear to be contained—a bush here and one there—but if you’ve ever tried to pull up a blackberry bush, you know that they are anything but contained. The vines weave in and out of the ground, tangling and expanding in ways that are unimaginable. Yet, they are all connected as one plant and one structure.
2 | The Evergreen State College | Writing Center
