Your portfolio documents the work of your Div II. Don’t wait until the end of your Div II to put it together. Start a binder and keep up with it as you work on your Div II. Share your portfolio with your Div II committee periodically. Think about how you show the range of what you accomplish. Your portfolio is your way painting, a picture of your work, the development of your thinking, and your strengths in academic and creative skills.
Things to keep as you go along:
1) Your contract should be there. Though it is bound to change, start with the contract you file and update it as you revise the contract. At the end of your Div II, you will put in your final revised contract that describes what is actually in the portfolio (what the concentration really ended up being).
2) Keep all evaluations for courses and other learning experiences that are part of your Div II (copied from the Hub). Include your self-evaluations too. Also include five college grades, transcripts from other institutions, and additional letters of evaluation or recommendation applicable to your work.
3) If you are doing an internship or other non-course evaluated experience, think about how to represent this work in your portfolio. Will there be a paper, photo documentary, video, etc.? Make sure your supervisor sends an evaluation to Central Records and include it in your portfolio. Central Records will make it a clickable box on your contract. That way, you can choose to add it to your transcript.
4) Here are things to collect:
- Include original copies of important papers with professors’ comments.
- There should be papers that show your ability to use the literature(s) of your field(s) and to formulate and argument/write an analytical paper.
- Consider and negotiate this with your committee how to best present visual or audio work that you are including – e.g. printed images, images or tracks on CD/DVD, or original work shown in the final meeting.
- Prepare work so it makes sense to the reader. For example, if you had an internship, do not simply include a daily journal. Write a short paper about the experience using excerpts from your journal to show your thinking and the experiences that affected it. Be creative in including non-course related work.
- If you go on field study/study abroad, consider what will be in your portfolio. Perhaps your chair will help you develop a syllabus of readings and suggest a paper for you to write to answer questions you have about your work.
- You might choose to include a process or progress section to demonstrate your growth in an important skill. For example, if your writing has really come along in your Div II, you can have a section showing the change over time; you could show multiple drafts of a paper to show how you revise your written work.
- You might choose to include a bibliography of readings that you have done during your Division II, including what you read outside of courses.
5) Demonstrate how you are engaging with non-western perspectives, race in the U.S., and/or the relationships between knowledge and power (see MCP requirement). Your work in multiple cultural perspectives can occupy a section of the portfolio or be discussed in your retrospective, depending on what makes sense with regards to the way you met this expectation. If you are keeping your portfolio as you go along, you can have a document that you revise periodically as your ideas about these issues change.
At the end of Division II, you will add your retrospective and organize your portfolio. Your selected work should be organized in a logical way (usually students use dividers to mark different sections of a binder devoted to different disciplines, courses, etc.). Once you have different sections, include a cover sheet introducing each section explaining what it there and why it’s included.