Portfolio Reflection

Mary Phillips
The past three and a half years here at Loras have been the most inspiring, challenging, and
formative years of my life. My college career has been filled with ups and downs, wins and
losses, lessons shared and lessons learned. Coming out on the other side and reflecting on my
experiences, I realize just how much I have grown.
While I have honed all four of the Loras dispositions, I see that I have developed a particular
competency in active learning. Active learners love learning, and they are inquisitive and
investigative. Active learners seek to understand their experiences. As I come from a family with
two parents in academia, I have always been extremely academically driven. Much of my
knowledge and learning occurred while sitting in a classroom. I was a good student, and I liked
to learn, but my main goal was simply to make it through formal schooling, so much of the
information I acquired would go in one ear and out the other. Coming in to college, however, I
was introduced to the concept of active learning. My first J-term class was called The Working
Poor. The class focused on the issue of global poverty from personal, cultural, and systemic
perspectives. It was not my first choice of classes, so I went in a bit pessimistic. Instead of sitting
in the classroom for three weeks and learning about issues affecting those who are poor, we took
our research out into the community, seeking answers to our own questions. We navigated the
city bus, bought an interview outfit from Goodwill for less than $10, interviewed local
businesses, and visited non-profits that are addressing poverty in the Dubuque community. I
remember reflecting on my experiences with feelings of shock, enlightenment, and curiosity. We
took our investigations and discussed them in class, working together to make sense of our
feelings and experiences. My active learning did not stop my first year. Over the course of my
college career, I have written a homily, conducted research in schools, and held several

internship positions. Applying my psychology major to active learning as a whole, I see that
while much of the book knowledge I acquire is memorized for only a short time, I have retained
much of my active learning information even to this day. The knowledge I have acquired is
attached to the experiences and feelings, making it more readily accessible. Overall, my
experiences with active learning have made me ask questions and seek answers in creative ways
and, ultimately, have made me fall in love with knowledge and value lifelong learning.
In addition, I notice that I have developed a particular competency in responsible
contributing. A responsible contributor is someone who develops and shares his or her talents
with the world in a way that respects cultural differences. My parents have always taught me that
my college education is an extreme privilege and that with this privilege also comes a great
responsibility to use it to contribute and to give back to the world. I always nodded my head and
rolled my eyes when they told me this because in the world I knew, most people went to college.
The reality, which as we know is quite the contrary, never really sank in until my time here at
Loras. This idea of responsible contribution has been made very clear and important to me
through my experiences with my Spanish major. Last year, I participated in an apprentice
translator volunteer position. Our team worked with Project Hope, a non-profit that works to
increase opportunities for community members. Specifically, we worked to translate their
resource manual from English to Spanish. Without a translated manual, their resources would not
be accessible to a large number of people in Dubuque. In this project, I applied my Spanish
language skills, as I thought I would, but it was much more than that. My liberal arts education
and my psychology major have developed my writing skills, of which I needed to demonstrate in
this project. Cumulatively, my education allowed me to contribute to the greater good in a
meaningful way. Additionally, this semester I interviewed for a psychology internship, and much

to my surprise, the supervisor was elated that I am also a Spanish major. She explained that they
just started working with a Hispanic family, and as the language barrier is proving to be very
difficult and frustrating for both parties, she said they could really use my skills to give this
family access to care. Obviously, my language skills will apply directly to this situation.
Additionally, however, I will need to think critically, a skill that I have honed in my liberal arts
education, and I will need to apply strong interpersonal skills, of which I have honed in my
psychology major. If I only knew the language piece, I wouldnt be able to relate to or interact
effectively with this family. These instances demonstrate the imperativeness of cumulating my
diverse education and exercising these multidisciplinary skills in order to give back to this world.
My Psychology major has specifically taught me how to collaborate in a group, a skill that I
have applied in many settings and disciplines. I have been a member of an advanced psychology
research team for 3 years now. A Type A personality, group collaboration has proved to be
difficult at times; my natural tendency is to take control in group situations. Often times, I would
clash with my group members and become frustrated when I thought people were being lazy or
not contributing fully. This semester, we worked on an IRB proposal for a qualitative research
study on aging. At one point, our professor was frustrated because work was not getting done
effectively and efficiently. We were all very discouraged. As juniors and seniors, we should be
able to collaborate in a group, right? In taking a step back, we realized that what we all had the
necessary skills, we just needed to capitalize. One of my group members was skilled in using
Psych Info, so he researched background information. Another group member was very
philosophical and able to see the bigger picture, so she covered the discussion of the purpose and
implications of our project. I am an organized person, so I put all of our parts together and
proofread the document. In the end, we produced a very high quality IRB. Thus, my psychology

major has taught more than how to simply work in a group: I have learned to be in a group,
assessing skills and capitalizing on those skills. People have different strengths, and my
psychology major has taught me not to see each individual as good or bad but to see a person as
a unique contributor to our group and to the bigger picture.
Additionally, my Psychology major has made me able to tolerate ambiguity. Growing up, I
loved math because there was generally one answer and one way to arrive at that answer. In
math, if I learned and knew the formula or procedure, I could apply it to almost any problem,
confident that I would get the correct answer; there is little ambiguity. Ethics, unfortunately, does
not work in this way. I cannot take an ethical dilemma, apply a formula or standard procedure,
and arrive at the correct answer. My psychology major has taught me that there are gray areas to
ethical issues: things are not always black and white or right and wrong. This ambiguity was
unsettling at first. How am I supposed to be an ethical decision maker in the world if there arent
always right and wrong answers? However, I have learned that I have been given the capacity to
think critically about issues, define and understand opposing arguments, seek concrete evidence
to support my claims, and develop a strong argument for ethical decisions. I especially applied
these skills when researching psychologists participation in torture. When I thought about a
topic like torture, I automatically concluded that torture was always morally and ethically wrong.
Why would it ever be okay to harm another person? It turns out that the APA had also taken an
abolitionist stance on this issue. After applying my Catholic biases, in addition to the APAs
stance, I could not wrap my head around why anyone would condone such heinous acts toward
human beings. After researching the opposition and considering their claim that the APA cannot
outlaw it when there are gray areas in the controversy, I was extremely taken back. The claim
made a great deal of sense. Although the argument did not change my position on the issue, I

tolerated and even accepted the idea that maybe this issue isnt as black and white as I originally
thought. For the first time, I was at peace with the ambiguity of the topic because I felt confident
in my ability to articulate my position and to understand the opposition. Overall, my psychology
education has helped me to recognize that engaging in ethical decision making is a lifelong
process. I will never be an entirely ethical person, so it is something that I will need to continue
to actively research, hone, and develop across my life and career.
Two other major experiences that have allowed me to integrate many skills from multiple
disciplines are study abroad and honors research. Contrary to my original thoughts, you do have
to study a little bit when you study abroad. However, I think my experience inside and outside
the classroom reaffirmed the beauty and power of being an active learner. Study abroad is mainly
active learning. Even when we were taking classes, our professors would have us do scavenger
hunts in the community or survey students on campus. It was pretty far off of the traditional,
lecture style education I am comfortable with, so many of the activities were challenging. It was
not so much that they challenged me intellectually, as they were in a completely different
language, but they challenged my confidence, perspectives, biases, and world views, which was
so piercingly impactful. It was in these active learning activities where my love for knowledge
and experience was reaffirmed.
My study abroad experience greatly challenged my cultural competency. I felt somewhat
prepared to face a new culture, as I had taken six years of Spanish education, participated in
psychology research at an immersion school, researched Spain in my pre-departure class, and
been trained in cultural competency through the honors program. I was ready to go! However, it
is one thing to learn about culture in a classroom and an entirely different thing to experience it
first-hand. Upon arrival, I encountered a great deal of culture shock, as I was put in situations

where my competency was tested, and it was much different from what I knew. For example, it is
customary to eat a big lunch together as a family, while my lunch here in the United States is
typically on the go. They almost always use silverware, while I tend to use my hands while
eating. I showed up fifteen minutes early for class, and we did not start until ten minutes after it
was supposed to start. I came home from hanging out with my friends at midnight, when it is
customary there to stay out and socialize until three or four in the morning. I forgot to turn my
lamp off when I was out of the room without realizing how expensive electricity and water are
there. Additionally, there was a three-week period where I was pretty sick or, as I like to say, a
three-week period in which I conducted an in-depth study of the Spanish health care system.
While they still have public and private healthcare, it is universal and accessible for all. Overall,
my first-hand experiences and discussions about them in my classes gave me a much deeper
understanding of both another culture and my own. I learned that, while I can continue to expand
my world view and cultural understanding each day, I will never be fully culturally competent.
Being a culturally competent person, like being an ethical person, requires a lifelong learning
commitment. Being in Spain ignited my desire to continue this education.
An unexpected result of my study abroad experience was my growth as an ethical decision
maker. A smaller scale, but nevertheless ethical, decision that I had to make was whether or not
to skip class and go on a trip hosted by the student network group. Traditionally, I would think
that it is never okay to deliberately skip class. However, as my psychology major has taught me,
there are actually gray areas to this ethical issue. What I am learning inside the classroom is
applied and realized outside the classroom, and sometimes, the active learning we do outside the
classroom is just as important as what we learn inside. Additionally, while watching the news
with my host mom one night and seeing the constant coverage of the U.S. election, I made a

comment to her about how Spain is really knowledgeable about our politics. My host moms
answer was both simple and profound. She said, Its because everything you do affects us.
Thinking back to my Christian Ethics class, we discussed virtue ethics, deontology, and
consequentialism. I learned that, when making an ethical decision, we may consider
consequences, rules, and becoming our essential selves as individuals and as humans. In this
situation, I know that everything the United States does affects the people outside our boarders,
and I believe that this knowledge changes the discussion about whether or not a decision our
country makes is ethical. Thus, my study abroad experience has challenged me to respect a
culturally diverse world when making ethical decisions.
Ultimately, my study abroad experience has shown me the power of making a gut decision.
In my senior seminar for psychology, we read a book called Blink, by Malcom Gladwell, and
discussed the power of split second decision making. We concluded that, sometimes, we can
make better and more valuable decisions without rationalizing or gathering copious amounts of
information and, instead utilizing our unconscious tendencies. In the beginning, everything about
study abroad worried me: money, being away from home, traveling, living with a family I didnt
know, classes, and language barriers. You name it, I was worried about it, and I used these
worries to rationalize my hesitancy in leaving. There was even a point where my mom looked at
me and asked if I wanted to stay home. However, something in my gut told me to go, and the
laundry list of worries was only holding me back. Looking back, all those worries and
uncertainties seem silly, and they almost stopped me from having the most valuable experience
of my life. Study abroad brought out a more confident version of myself. I allowed myself to
take risks and to put aside my constant need to make plans. I left with friends that I will love for
the rest of my life. Study abroad gave me a different perspective of the world, a world beyond

the very small view I had originally known. Like many of the risks I take in life, this one touched
my heart in beautiful and unexpected ways.
Additionally, my work in the Honors Program has allowed me to apply the Loras
dispositions and my knowledge from multiple disciplines. Through the Honors Program, I have
been involved in a three year, collaborative interdisciplinary project (CIP). My group, which
consists of myself and five other honors students, is called the Loras College Solar Power
Initiative (LoCo SoPo) group. We have identified that Loras may participate more fully in the
clean energy movement by installing solar panels on campus. As Loras does not have solar
panels anywhere on campus, we have had to actively learn throughout this process, talking with
community partners, working with faculty and staff, and fundraising. Additionally, concept of
ethics, and my ability to tolerate a gray area, applies to my honors project as well. Our ethical
question is: do we, as a country, state, community, or educational institution have an ethical
obligation to join the clean energy movement? Originally, our group accepted the idea that
climate change is a reality; we accepted it as fact. However, as we experience transitions in
political leadership, our group faces people that truly believe that climate change is not impacted
by human activity but natural processes that we do not fully understand. So, they would answer
our ethical question with a resounding No. Thus, there is a gray area to this ethical issue.
My CIP does not simply say that I can work in a group, but it says that I can work with
people from differing backgrounds and values. Altogether, the members of our group cover
studies in English, Kinesiology, Math, Economics, Catholic Studies, Peace and Justice,
Psychology, and Spanish. Working in a group like this is both challenging and rewarding. As
Psychology major, I was very optimistic about our ability to bring solar to Loras; I was focused
on the individual and collective impact they would make. However, the Math and Economics

majors were pessimistic, as they focused on the finances that our group would need to make the
project a reality. While the contrast was frustrating, we both brought very important points to
light, and we learned the power of gaining insight from multiple disciplines. As a result, I have
learned about other disciplines and have been able to apply them. We all have differing strengths,
perspectives, and values, and, in sharing them, it has turned out to be so much more fruitful and
impactful than simply having one perspective.
When I think about my Loras experience as a whole, rather than individual parts, I think of
the motto, Be More, Be Loras. I saw the phrase on one of my first days on campus. The motto
struck me. A perfectionist at heart, which has been a consistent challenge in my education, I
automatically replaced the "be" with "do" in my head. I assumed that to "Be More" was
synonymous with "Do More." For a while, this meant constantly striving to perfect my
homework and projects, involving myself in countless clubs and organizations, and constantly
working until, at the end of the day, I still didn't think I had done enough. I was "Being More,"
right? Not exactly. While this motto encourages students to excel in and out of the classroom, I
was missing the bigger picture. I believe my four years of a liberal arts education at Loras
College have provided me with a much better definition of what it truly means to "Be More." To
Be More is to contribute actively, responsibly, ethically, and reflectively. To Be More is to think
in a creative, critical, and multidisciplinary manner. To Be More is to experience and appreciate
the world beyond the tiny portion I am familiar with. To Be More is to believe that things do not
have to be black and white. To Be More is to be grateful, compassionate, joyful, and loving. To
Be More is to see each person for their God given human dignity. To Be More is to never stop
learning, even once formal education ends. To Be More is to strive for life balance by working

diligently while maintaining self-love. To Be More is to say tell myself each day that I have done
enough. To Be More, Be Loras is to be a Duhawk forever.