Post responses to the messages of 2 classmates. Write about 75 words for each reply, do not write over 75 words.

First one,

I am considering analyzing the much-too-common occurrence of the infamous “Freshman Fifteen”. I have also thought about taking on the problem of the high suicide rates among teens and/or college students.

For the “Freshman Fifteen”, I already have some basic knowledge on the causes of this – lack of exercise after high school due to lack of extracurricular involvement, as well as the eating style of the average college kid teaming up with the setup and system of on-campus eating. The consequences are fairly obvious, as this new weight has the potential to increase chances of health issues. I would plan to expand on that, looking up facts and statistics on the matter.

As for today’s suicide rates, there are many causes. Stress from school, family matters, and depression are a few reasons, but there are obviously many more causes. I would plan to fill my paper with a lot of alarming facts and statistics on this matter in order to show how real it is. The consequences following any suicide are very dramatic, again, for obvious reasons. Families are distraught and lost after losing a loved one in any way, but this particular cause of death may add to the suffering.

For both of my ideas, I am wondering about how broad I should be. Should I focus on freshmen in Michigan, freshmen at SVSU, or is “freshmen” by itself not too broad for this particular essay? For my suicide essay, again, how broad should I be – Michigan or The United States? Also, I wonder whether it would be better to do that essay on “teens” or “college students”.

Thank you in advance for any feedback, I could certainly use some!

Second one

For a while now I’ve been waffling through several potential ideas for my project analysis. These ideas have included financial illiteracy, childhood obesity, and the treatment of animals in large pet stores (PetSmart, WalMart pet department, etc.). However, some of these topics I found too broad while others (particularly the one about animal treatment in large pet stores) would be very difficult to find sources for. So, I’m leaning more toward a topic that relates directly to what I do at SVSU.

Several of the computers in The Valley Vanguard office are over a decade old, with the newest ones in the office being over six years old. Efforts have been made to try and improve or replace these computers, but to no avail. The poor condition of these computers adds hours to our work every week, dealing with program shut-downs, entire computer shut-downs, the inability to use programs such as Microsoft Word or Preview, among others. Additionally, for those interested in perusing journalism or communication as a field, having extremely outdated technology hinders their ability to experientially learn about the field they want to go into. The main cause of this problem is poor financial performance of the newspaper, which can be attributed to declining university funding for the Vanguard, and a decrease in newspaper advertisement sales industry wide. This has left minimal room in the Vanguard’s budget to purchase even one, let alone six new computers.

My main concern concern for choosing this topic is that it isn’t really something I’ll be able to put much research into outside of contacting a few offices at SVSU. For instance, there won’t be any scholarly journals regarding old computers in college newspaper offices.

I look forward to hearing what feedback some of you may have on this idea.