The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.

Policies and support

Academic integrity, for a course about introspection

Every assessment in this course asks for your own description of your own experience. That’s a different integrity risk than a normal essay: it’s much harder to plagiarise a sensation, but much easier to fabricate one. Submitting a description of an experience you did not actually attempt to have — inventing the “aha!” moment you never noticed, or the ache you never let yourself feel — is treated as an integrity breach on the same footing as copied work, because it counterfeits the one thing this course actually measures.

If a practicum genuinely didn’t produce anything noticeable, say so. An honest “I tried the induction and nothing happened” is worth marks. A confident description of an experience you skipped is not.

Late work and extensions

Assessments are due at the time stated on each assessment’s page. There is no late-submission window: work submitted after the deadline is not accepted. Extensions are available, but only if requested and agreed before the deadline passes — get in touch with the teaching team as early as you know you’ll need one, not after the fact.

The experience grant

A $100 grant is disbursed on alternate weeks — weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 — toward that week’s practicum. You don’t have to spend it the week it lands, and you don’t have to spend it on that week’s experience: if cold water is genuinely out of reach in week 1 but a dark-sky trip is within reach that same month, carry the money forward and spend it there instead. What you can’t do is bank it past the semester or spend it on anything outside the twelve experiences this course names — every dollar disbursed has to end up funding an attempt at one of them, and by week 12 all of it needs to be accounted for.

Every dollar spent needs a dated receipt attached to the noticing log entry it funded. This is the same evidentiary logic as the log itself: a receipt dated the day of the induction is worth more than a description of one, for the same reason a same-day entry is worth more than one written a week later.

This exists to make an honest thing visible: money changes what’s available to you as “the same” experience. A cold shower and a cryotherapy chamber are not obviously identical inductions, and neither are a backyard and a dark-sky reserve an hour’s drive away. Notice what the money changed about the experience, and say so in the log — don’t launder it into the account as if it weren’t a factor.

Practicum participation

The twelve practicums ask you to actually attempt an experience, not just read about one, and participation is mandatory. The noticing log already sets the floor: a dated entry for at least 6 of weeks 1–10’s ten practicums. There is no course-wide option to opt out of practicums altogether — the one carve-out is week 11’s, below, and it exists for a narrower, wellbeing-specific reason than simply preferring not to.

Grief week — support and opt-out

Week 11’s practicum asks you to sit with an experience of grief that is already part of your life; it does not ask anyone to manufacture a new loss. That said, this is the one week in the course where the target experience can carry real weight, and this policy exists so no one has to navigate that weight silently.

If any part of week 11 doesn’t feel like the right thing to do right now, you have three options, all fully legitimate and none of them penalised:

Reach out to Sef Amaral, the course tutor, before or during week 11 if you want to talk through which option makes sense for you, or if anything in that week brings up something you need support with beyond the course itself.