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Tavares Bush
Rebecca Agosta
UWRT 1103-007
24 November 2014
Joining and Balancing Multiple Discourse Communities
Being a freshman at college can be really stressful. This is stressful because classes
include more work and less time actually being in class. The environment of class is different
because you can come and leave as you please. Also, typical freshman stay on the college
campus. This can make a freshman life hectic. A hectic life is a result of freshman not knowing
many people and they may not know where you may fit in. With the stress of both classes and
trying get adjusted to not living at home, most college students just go to class and sleep in their
free time. Other college students chose to join some of the discourse communities that the
campus as to offer.
Discourse communities are specific groups that share the same values and
communication skills that only people involve in that discourse community knows about. The
majority of discourse communities have a common goal within that community that they want to
achieve. Linguist John Swales defines discourse communities in six specific characteristics.
Swales characteristics within a discourse community includes having a set of common goals,
having mechanisms of intercommunications among its members, using its participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information, utilizing and hence passing one or more genres in
communicating its aims, and has an organizational levels of power between their members to
create some ideas.
Most college students who join discourse communities join so that they can meet new
people, have great experiences, and have leadership experience. While this is a great reason to

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join a discourse community on campus most students are hesitant to join because they do not
know how to balance their involvement in discourse communities along with their course load at
college.
Methods
My inquiry was to find out how an individual is able to be balance multiple discourse
communities while still being successful college student by achieving good grades. I also wanted
to find out how this individual represent themselves in different discourse communities. My
researched started when I was brainstorming on who I can observe that was not only a part of
multiple discourse communities but also continued to excel in their academics. As I was thinking
one person kept coming to mind. This is a person that I will literally see all the time on campus.
This person was named Jared Dobbertin. Jared Dobbertin is currently a sophomore at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte and he is studying business.
Jared Dobbertin is extremely involved in discourse communities on campus. Jared is in
UNC Charlottes Student Government where his role is a Senator in the Legislative Branch. To
become a Senator, an individual will have apply and campaign so that fellow students can elect
you. As a senator you typically vote on things that are in the best interest of the students. Along
with being a senator and representing his college he also choose to take on the duty of being a
chairman in one of the more important committees within the Student Government. The
committee he is in charge of is called Organizational Ways of Means committee. This committee
is in charge of granting money to all of the other discourse communities so that they can afford
to have events on campus. He is also a very active member in his fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha.
To be a part of Lambda Chi Alpha you have to express interest to join and after you express
interest you have to rush. After you rush there is a selection process that prospective students

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must go through. Lambda Chi Alpha is the only fraternity on campus that did not get kicked out
of Greek Village. Lambda Chi Alpha is the third largest fraternity in the nation and the UNC
Charlotte chapter exceeds the average grade point average for all of the Greeks on campus. The
fraternitys core values are loyalty, duty, respect, service and stewardship, honor, integrity, and
personal courage. In addition to his involvement in those two discourse communities he was
also an orientation counselor over the summer. In order to become an orientation counselor you
have to apply online and go through an interview process. If you do well in the interview you
will be selected to be an orientation counselor and help lead the incoming freshman class along
with transfer students around campus during the summer. When you are an orientation counselor
you are a part of a discourse community that value creating the best atmosphere for incoming
students. Within that community you start to have a great bond with the other counselors from
that summer.
Analysis
As part of my research, I had Jared Dobbertin sit down with me while I conducted an
interview that lasted a little over an hour. My purposes of having this interview was to have
direct reasons of why he chose to join multiple discourse communities when he arrived at college
and to question him about whether or not his involvement in these communities hurt is
academics at the university. I collected his response by jotting them down in a notebook. In the
interview, I learned the fact of him choosing to join multiple discourse communities was a
domino effect after he joined a fraternity. His big brother in his fraternity happened to also be the
Student Body Vice President of UNC Charlotte Student Government. He challenged Jared to
become even more involved on campus and join Student Government. Student Government
really encompasses Swales sixth characteristics of discourse communities. Jareds big brother

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convinced him to start off by becoming a freshman at large senator. Jared decided to go ahead
and step outside of his comfort zone and run for Senate. He was pretty surprised that he was
elected and credit his win because, I was the first name on the ballet and I think people just
voted for me because of that. I honestly did not do any campaigning. I feel like many students
feel this way while running for any type of position on campus. While he was serving on senate
he was brought to the attention of becoming an orientation counselor. When he found out more
information on being an orientation counselor and the fact that they get paid really well along
with free housing for the following year he jumped to the opportunity to apply. Jared says, I am
so happy that I had the opportunity to be an OC (orientation counselor) because it opened up my
eyes to so many different opportunities on campus. Now after being here over the summer, I
have so many connections to faculty and people that are super important on campus. After
hearing this I was very intrigued on how an individual can balance this. He credits having a
descriptive meeting schedule, studying schedule, and to always set time aside to doing fun things
you love to do by yourself like lift and play basketball. This makes being involved in multiple
discourse communities strictly fun and not a thing in which you hate being a part of.
I also observed Jared conduct an Organizational Ways of Means committee. The main
point of my observation was to see how Jared represent himself as the leader of the
Organizational Ways of Means. Jared hosts this meeting every Tuesday and sends out emails to
remind the committee members what they need to do. While observing the meeting I could
clearly see his leadership qualities in this discourse community. Jared stress that his meetings
always have to start on time at 5:00. This is because he scheduled hearings for organizations to
tell the committee why they want to hold the event and why UNC Charlotte Student Government
should give them money to do so. In the meeting, Jared and his committee members was using

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language that outsiders would not recognize. They were using Robert Rules of Order. They were
also referring to what they called FPA which is the Financial Procedures Act. Basically the
FPA is a list of rules and reasons of why and why not a discourse community cannot receive
money. Jared and his committee members were extremely familiar with the FPA because some
time they said rules that were in it without looking at the FPA. All of Jareds committee meetings
are recorded for public record. The meeting that I observed lasted around three hours. The first
hour was strictly dedicated for the hearing. The second hour was to discuss their progress for the
semester and possible changes that wanted to make for to the FPA. The big thing that they were
discussing was that how they only had 40 percent of the budget to use. Knowing this, Jared mad
the tough decision to stop granting money for the rest of the semester. The last hour Jared, was
mainly telling the committee some things he would like to change with the committee as a
whole. Jared wanted to leave his mark on this committee by introducing online grants. This
change means that discourse communities on campus will have to submit their grants online
rather than turning them in by hand. As a result, this will make the committee meetings shorter.
After the meeting ended I realized that Jareds involvement was very important in the discourse
community. He made sure to come off as serious because without his involvement in this
discourse community the community would most likely deconstruct financially.
In conclusion, after interviewing and observing Jared Dobbertin I noticed that it is
possible to join multiple discourse communities on campus and still be academically successful.
Jared even credits his academic success to joining multiple discourse communities because being
a Senator, being a part of a Fraternity, and being an orientation counselor all require a high grade
point average. It is also a great way to meet new people and create his support system which will
result help with the stress of college.

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Work Cited
Dobbertin, Jared. Personal Interview. 31 October 2014
SGA Organizational Ways of Means Committee Senate Meeting. Observation. November 4,
2014
Swales, John. ''The Concept of Discourse Community." Genre Analysis: English in Academic
and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990.21-32. Print.
"Why You Should Encourage Your College Student to Get Involved on Campus." College
Parent Central RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Nov. 2014.