INST 154
Apollo at 50
Fall 2019
E5: Term Paper

The goal of your term paper will be to apply what you have leaned in about what made Apollo successful to begin to think about how other "big things" were accomplished, or might in the future be accomplished. You will select some other audacious goal that either was, was not, or has yet to be achieved. Then over the course of the semester, you should try to draw parallels between your chosen goal and the Apollo Program.

There are many types of goals that you might consider, including:

Note that you might disagree with the way I have grouped these. For example, the AIDS crisis was as much a social challenge as it was a challenge for medical "technology," some technologies are used in armed conflict (e.g., nuclear weapons, but also the Internet), and armed conflict sometimes arises from social challenges. And you might easily think of other categories (e.g., the economic rise of China doesn't fit neatly into any of these categories). The key is to have some way of thinking about what kind of challenge you want to study, and having a list of categories with a few examples may be useful as a starting point. Note also that not all of my examples were completely successful (Nixon's war on drugs, for example), but we can learn as much from failure as from success. So don't hesitate to choose a (partial) failure if the goal was important and ambitions.

At the end of the semester, you will then write a 4-6 page (single-spaced, standard margins, 12-point font, not counting references) term paper in which you draw on what you have learned in this class to focus on the factors that did, didn’t, will or won’t make it possible to achieve your chosen goal. There are many aspects of the Apollo program that you might consider for comparison and contrast with your chosen goal, including, for example:

Surely you can add to that list.

Part 1: Select a Goal

First select a goal and write a half page about it. We want to know what your goal is (in not much more detail than listed above in the examples), why you selected it (i.e., what about it do you find interesting as a basis for comparison with Apollo), when did or will it happen, and what you already know about it (i.e., will this all be new to you, or is it something you have already studied?). Feel free to select any of the examples used above, or any other similarly ambitious goal (please don't select something of much smaller scale, such as inventing Facebook or earning a Ph.D.). It would be best if your goal were situated after the widespread introduction of printing (about 1450), and if it is a future goal if it were in the twenty-first century -- there is little to be gained by entering the realm of further back history (where fewer sources may be available) or science fiction (where it might be hard to ground your claims adequately). This assignment is graded as part of your final term paper grade, and we will offer feedback on your proposal. You must work individually on your term paper, even if one or more other students in the class select a related focus.

Part 2: Do your research

As the semester proceeds, you should take notes about aspects of the Apollo program that you can compare and contrast with the goal you have selected. You should strive to have a new insight on this every week or two, and to write down your thoughts at the time. Then when you finish your team experience you will already have notes assembled that will give you a structure for thinking about how to tackle big challenges.

The next thing to do is to see how others have already thought about your problem. Internet sources can be useful as ways of getting started, but for real depth you will eventually want to find a few good books on the topic. You don't need to read the the whole book in each case -- and indeed you won't have time to -- but you will benefit enormously from reading parts of them. Internet sources are often designed to advocate a position rather than to provide a detailed analysis of an issue, and you really do need access to detailed analysis to shape your thinking. Both the University libraries and the public libraries have many (but not nearly all) of their books available online, so finding the books you need may well be possible even wen physical libraries are shut down.

Part 3: Create an Outline

A good strategy when writing a paper on a complex topic is to outline your paper. For this paper, your outline should contain at least
  1. An introduction that clearly states the goal;
  2. A background section that describes the context in which your goal was, was not, or may yet be achieved;
  3. a section analyzing the factors that made or may make your goal achievable (or unachievable!);
  4. the story of how your goal did work out or speculation on how it may work out; and
  5. a conclusion in which you draw out some important points that can be learned from your analysis about how big things get done, illuminating both commonalities with and differences from Apollo.
As the grading rubric below indicates, the most important part of this is part 3, the "analysis of factors." You'll want to identify 5-10 factors (fewer if you want to analyze each in depth; more if you want to cover a broader range of factors) and then do a fairly detailed analysis of each factor. Good factors are those that are common to many audacious efforts. For example, if your goal was to win the American Civil War, the size of your economy would be a good factor to choose, but which General was in charge at a specific battle would not be (because you don't want factors that apply only to one thing). As a starting point for identifying broadly applicable factors I have created a list of factors that we have touched on in one way or another during this semester that applied to Apollo, wording each in a way that I expect would be generally applicable to many efforts to do "big things."

Upload your outline to ELMS by the date shown it the syllabus. Your outline will be graded as a part of your term paper grade. Don't miss this step -- the single things most strongly correlated with getting a good grade on the paper is submitting a well thought out outline on which we can give you comments!

Part 4: Draft your Paper

Once you are ready to write the paper, you can simply pick any part of the outline and start writing. It is usually best to start in the middle -- the introduction and the conclusion are easier to write after the rest of the paper is there. Don't try to make your first draft perfect -- write quickly, leave yourself notes on things that you need to go back and fix, and then at the end you'll be able to go back and get those details fleshed out. Try to write the whole paper in a few days -- it is often easier to make progress when you get on a roll and the ideas start flowing. Note that the goal here is not to get to a perfect paper but to one that can be improved -- you can't improve your paper until it exists, so the sooner it exists, the better it will be in the end.

Then you spend few days working through the paper and improving it, and doing some focused research to fill in gaps in your knowledge. Your goal should be to get to a fairly smooth paper -- that must be complete but that does not yet need to be perfect. Before class on the date indicated in the schedule, upload a complete draft of your term paper to ELMS. This is not the final version -- we will assign two of your discussion table partners to read it, and you will read two of theirs. Then at our next class session you'll have a chance to discuss you paper and their paper with them. Your TA will also give you comments.

Part 5: Polish your Paper and Submit It

At this point you will have seen two other papers, and gotten comments from at least two people on your paper, and you will have been thinking about it for several weeks. So you should be ready to take a pass with fresh eyes and further improve it. Once you do, you would be wise to send it to a friend for a final read and comments before you turn it in. As with all of your writing, you must cite your sources, use quotation marks where you quote from a source, and scrupulously avoid plagiarism. Your final paper must be uploaded to ELMS by the date and time indicated in the schedule, which is during the final exam period.

Example

An example of a good term paper from a prior semester is available. Note, however, that the length requirements in that semester were different. Note also that this is just one example of a good term paper -- there are many other factors that could have been included in the analysis, and there are several other ways of organizing that analysis. Finally, note that this paper addresses a goal that was remarkably similar to Apollo (in the sense that both goals essentially called for technical accomplishments) and that if you are working on a goal ore focused on human behavior than on technology that you will likely find many more differences from Apollo (as the readings class session 26 can help to illustrate).

Grading Rubric

The following rubric will be used to grade your assignment:
Doug Oard
Last modified: Tue May 5 22:11:00 2020