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Life
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What is Life?

Life as an academic topic appears across nearly every discipline because it touches the fundamental conditions of human existence — how individuals develop, make choices, navigate systems, and find meaning. In personal issues courses, sociology, nursing, literature, and ethics, students are asked to examine what shapes lived experience and how institutions, relationships, and culture either support or constrain individual ability. The topic resists easy definition, which is precisely what makes it intellectually rich: it forces writers to clarify terms, interrogate assumptions, and connect abstract concepts to concrete human realities.

The papers archived here reflect a genuinely wide range of approaches. Literary analysis appears in essays on works such as Bernice Morgan's fiction and Bessie Head's "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses," where writers examine how characters construct identity, belonging, and personal freedom. Policy and ethical frameworks drive essays on abortion, DNR legislation, and prison overcrowding, while sociological and cultural analysis informs work on parenting styles, family therapy, and soccer hooliganism. Observational and practice-based writing — such as operating room reflections and evidence-based nursing — grounds the topic in professional experience, showing how the concept of life plays out in direct care and institutional settings.

A strong essay on this topic begins with a focused, arguable thesis rather than a broad statement about life in general. Evidence drawn from specific texts, case studies, policy documents, or observed practice carries far more weight than vague generalization. The most common pitfall is treating "life" as self-evident — a compelling essay defines its scope early, specifying which dimension of individual experience or social process it actually intends to examine.

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Paper Undergraduate

Parental involvement and adolescent aspirations toward achievement

Parent Involvement and Student Achievement

Paper Undergraduate

Business intelligence implementation challenges and organizational alignment

¶ … technological advances of today's society seem to grow as rapidly as the human population itself. Human interaction with this technology defines its culture and allows a certain way of life to flourish or diminish.

Paper Doctorate

The middle range theory of unpleasant symptoms in cancer patients

Within the field of nursing there are many theories that receive a great deal of attention for the manner in which they assist nurses in treating patients. The middle range theory of unpleasant symptoms was developed…

Paper Doctorate

Impressionism and post-impressionism: artistic response and evolution

This paper will explore impressionism vs. post-impressionism including the influences of each on each other and society, and the effects of each other on the 19th century. The paper will ascertain how one period revived…

Paper Doctorate

Masculinity and gender in science fiction: Haldeman's Forever Peace and Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness

Science fiction has always been a masculine genre, no matter that Mary Shelley invented it in her novel Frankenstein. Until fairly recent times, most science fiction writers were men, and they dealt with subjects like technology, power, space battles, featuring male heroes, explorers and adventurers. In film, science fiction has been a perfect subject for ultra-masculine actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, although Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien trilogy proved that women could be masculine heroes as well and very effective at destroying hostile creatures that threaten humanity. Joe Haldeman's novel Forever Peace certainly fits within this conventional masculine narrative in science fiction, since the story is related by a male narrator named Sergeant Julian Class, an alienated soldier of the First World who opposes his own government and society. He is a class type of alienated and disillusioned male hero who nevertheless hopes that the world can achieve peace and prosperity through better use of technology. Even though it was written thirty years before, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is a radical departure from these types of themes and characters, since it takes place on an underdeveloped planet called Gethen far in the future.

Paper Undergraduate

Dennis McDonald's thesis on Homeric influence in the Gospel of Mark

Dennis McDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000) is a book that was always guaranteed to upset orthodox Christian theologians and biblical literalists and fundamentalists everywhere, since its main thesis held that the author of the first gospel used the Iliad and the Odyssey as literary models. He compares Mark to the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, a Gnostic book, and describes it as a "hypotext" that "relies somehow on a written antecedent" (McDonald, p. 2). Specifically, Mark used Books 22 and 24 of the Iliad as models for the death and burial of Jesus, in which Achilles brutally kills Hector and then releases the body to his father, King Priam of Troy. Hector's soul went to Hades and never returned, but of course Jesus was resurrected on the third day, even if his rather dim disciples in Mark failed to recognize him initially.

Paper Undergraduate

Fascination and repulsion from Otherness in Song of Kali and The City of Joy

In this chapter, I examine similarities and differences between The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre (1985) and Song of Kali by Dan Simmons (1985) with regard to the themes of the Western journalistic observer of the Oriental Other, and the fascination-repulsion that inspires the Occidental spatial imaginary of Calcutta. By comparing and contrasting these two popular novels, both describing white men's journey into the space of the Other, the chapter seeks to achieve a two-fold objective: (a) to provide insight into the authors with respect to alterity (otherness), and (b) to examine the discursive practices of these novels in terms of contrasting spatial metaphors of Calcutta as "The City of Dreadful Night" or "The City of Joy." The chapter further argues that these spatial metaphors are redolent of what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) refer to as the "phobic enchantment" (p. 124) of the Occidental social imaginary for the poverty, squalor and the horror of the Third World.

Paper Doctorate

Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret: The Power" and the law of attraction

Rhonda Byrne's The Secret: The Power (2010) is truly an incredibly bad book, simplistic, repetitive and divorced from real history, politics or economics, yet it has sold 19 million copies. A cynic might say that the real secret to wealth is writing a bestselling book that millions will buy. Her 2006 book The Secret sold more over 19 million copies and was translated into 46 languages, and she was also a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show and many others on the daytime TV chat circuit. Like all self-help writers, she has a talent for publishing the same advice repeatedly in new books that claim to offer even greater insights than past philosophers and religious teachers and in 2007 Byrne wrote The Secret Gratitude Book, followed a year later by The Secret: Daily Teachings. Her latest offering is about 250 pages long and quickly appeared on the bestseller lists, which indicates the type of strong cult following that all publishers desire. Byrne's central thesis is that human beings can change their entire lives and have everything they want simply by wishing for it, including money, wealth, happiness, careers, and romantic relationships.

Paper Undergraduate

Complementary and alternative medicine for treating mental health disorders

It is noteworthy that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has managed to get global recognition as a feasible alternative or combined remedy to biomedicine. In the past it had been the most rapidly-spreading segment of health services in the United States. Exercises for the purpose of clinical intervention, health promotion, as well as, illness avoidance that are not used or not part of the curriculum in the medical colleges along with remedies not encompassed by any healthcare program serves as a description and classification of CAM. This paper focuses on CAM and its effectiveness.

Thesis Undergraduate

Labor union organization and working conditions in Pacific Northwest canneries

This is a researhc paper that discusses the relationship between workplace environment and productivity. Through diverse research into this topic it is possible to see that one correlates well with the other. This paper also examinmes the role of unions and other organizations in the Pacific Northwest. Several large regional companies are compared for their union involvement and the ILWU is examined also.

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