By Colleen Campbell, contributing writer
Oakland University senior Adam Hobart spent a semester poring over a 50-page research paper on the motives behind a landmark labor law. Reading hundreds of pages of congressional records, newspaper archives, stacks of books, along with the writing and editing, has now paid off for Hobart, a double major in English and history.
Hobart was one of two second-place recipients of the Nels Andrew Cleven prize for his paper, “War of Words: The Road to Landrum-Griffin,” in Phi Alpha Theta's national Best Paper competition. In March, another version of the paper won first place at the history honor society's Michigan Regional Conference.
“Editing it down to 12 pages was a nightmare,” Hobart said. That was the requirement for the regional competition. He said adding 13 more pages back on for the nationals was a bit easier.
Professor Clayton Drees of Virginia Wesleyan College said there were 58 papers submitted in the national competition, 43 of them competing in the undergraduate category with Hobart.
This October, Hobart received an e-mail stating that his paper placed second in the nation. “It was unceremonious, but it was still nice,” he said. “I didn't think I had a one in a million shot of winning a prize; I only entered because I wanted the experience of editing the paper. The biggest thing I learned from winning is that the only thing worse than failing is never having tried. That's an important lesson for anyone who never bothers to even enter these things because they don't think they have a chance.”
Hobart's professor and Oakland's Phi Alpha Theta chapter adviser, Dan Clark, said that this was the first time an OU student has even entered the national competition since he's been here. Clark teaches two research writing courses for history majors, Seminar in Historical Research and the senior capstone course. Hobart's paper materialized from the former.
“I never expected an award-winning paper from the first of the research writing classes,” Clark said. “It's a testament to his ability.”
Clark said the first seminar class is designed to introduce students to the rudiments of history papers. “I build the class around revisions so students deliver both a first and second draft to me and to the class. I have the students do intensive peer editing and commenting,” he continued.
Clark said Hobart did his fair share of contributing to others' papers as well. Because of his dedication to his classmates and his achievements with his own work, Clark is nominating Hobart for yet another honor.
“Adam’s comments on his classmates’ drafts were first-rate, certainly of graduate-seminar quality,” Clark wrote in a letter to the committee that selects recipients of Oakland University's Undergraduate Distinguished Achievement Award.
Hobart said he chose his topic for the paper because it was fresh in his mind from a labor history class he took with Clark before the seminar. He said the paper ended up being an analysis of what went on in the media and congress as the bill was coming to fruition, how the public saw the intentions of the bill and what those intentions actually were.
“This bill throughout history is supposed to be really important in guaranteeing democracy in big unions,” Hobart said. The research process also helped Hobart appreciate his professor, who he said always gave him a “subtle nudge” in the right direction, and to not put too much trust in what even a historian says.
“Looking at primary sources, you realize historians don't always get it right,” he said. “There's a lot of guess work that goes into this. You learn skepticism.”
Clark said there is an abundance of career opportunities for history students like Hobart who can look at data and problems and distill it into an argument.
“Being able to think, analyze and write will set you apart from enormous amounts of peers,” he said. “We think that those skills are timeless.”
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