Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- All Subjects: development
- Creators: School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
Now I wasn’t the first one to discover the canyon, but I remember a time when I was in the fourth grade. When I stepped out of a bus that I had been in for close to four hours and took forty footsteps to end up at a small brick wall that came close to calf-height which was meant to keep me safe. I don’t know why it didn’t hit me until this point, because I had seen pictures of its grandeur and “experienced” the so called “majesty” of the Grand Canyon through the medium of the National Geographic and tasted of the beauty of one of the natural wonders of the world through the photographs of others before, but standing face to face with a five-thousand-foot cliff humbled me and brought a fear in to me that I can’t describe. Especially when a friend of mine had violently jerked me while I was close to the edge. I remember hearing fear in my father’s voice as I got a little too close to the edge for his comfort. He wanted me to be safe, but I wanted to look this canyon in the eye.
I find it really interesting though, that both my father and I feared ME getting close to the edge. I guess it’s because we both didn’t fully trust my young and feeble knees to keep me stable while I was that close to a fall that would’ve meant sure death for me. Or maybe it was because a couple of months before this, he had seen on the news that some kid was playing too close to the edge and had fallen to his death. Or maybe, it was because, for the first time, death was actually close enough to grasp something he profoundly loved. Either way, I won’t ever forget the loving strain in his voice as he sternly said “Grant! Step a little bit further back from the edge Son.”
It’s really a shame that no one knew. Or at least that no one said anything if they did know. Especially because this New canyon I stood looking face to face with was thousands of feet deeper than the one I had been close to the edge of ten years before, and had the authority to not just kill me once, but twice, if I fell.
The outlying cities of Phoenix's West Metropolitan experienced rapid growth in the past ten years. This trend is only going to continue with an average expected growth of 449-891% between 2000 and 2035 (ADOT, 2012). Phoenix is not new to growth and has consistently seen swaths of people added to its population. This raises the question of what happened to the people who lived in Phoenix's West Valley during this period of rapid change and growth in their communities? What are their stories and what do their stories reveal about the broader public history of change in Phoenix's West Valley? In consideration of these questions, the community oral histories of eight residents from the West Valley were collected to add historical nuance to the limited archival records available in the area. From this collection, the previous notion of "post-war boomtowns” describing Phoenix’s West Valley was revealed to be highly inaccurate and dismissive of the residents' experiences who lived and formed their lives there.