Portfolio Concept

As you work through the semester (and the rest of your academic career) you will accumulate a body of work (lab reports, posterd, term papers, etc.).   I encourage you to keep these and other "artefacts" (as they are called) of your academic career in two forms:  electronic and hard copy.  Think of it as a neatly-organized "best-of" scrapbook.  Here is why. 

 While GPA remains probably the greatest ticket to future prospects, increasingly employers, graduate programs, etc. are interested in what is known as a portfolio, or efolio in some cases.  A portfolio is an accumulation of the tangible products of your education, and you use it to show the breadth and depth of the actual work that you have done.  This has a long history in the arts but is now increasingly common in the sciences and other disciplines. In some cases, the electronic version is fine, but in other cases they want the actual graded paper so that they know that you didn't just make this up for the application.  Some like to see the drafts that went into the work, to illustrate how you learned and responded to criticism and to show improvement.  It is relativelly simple to accumulate this as you go along, and REALLY difficult to reconstruct after the fact.   It is also an excellent reason to strive to produce the best possible products; they are worth more than simply an immediate grade.  Something to think about...

 

CSUS BIO SCI