Final Reflection

Akib Islam

Professor Maria Cipriani

ENG 1101

18 December 2022

                                                                                            Final Reflection

What I have learned about myself as a reader in this term is that I genuinely like reading. For many years, I didn’t like to read books. I only enjoyed reading Instagram posts, and tweets from Twitter or videos with text on TikTok. I never really had a passion for reading ever since I was young. It never interested me to just pick up a book and start reading. But after my first semester in college taking my first English course, I can officially say that my mind has changed about reading. I now have a passion for reading. I never picked up a book because I was afraid I was going to waste my time if I didn’t enjoy reading it. But after reading all the short stories from this semester, I can see that there are a lot of interesting books out there. One of the short stories from this semester I really enjoyed was called “Mother Tongue.” I think I enjoyed it so much because of how much I related to it. The author, Tan, wrote a sentence where she explained that some of her friends can understand fifty percent of what Tan’s mother says, some say they understand eighty to ninety percent, and some say they don’t understand at all. In my DEJ I wrote about how I related to that. I wrote “I relate to this a lot. I have a friend named Jacob who comes over to my house quite often. He always greets my mom and she greets him back. My mom will ask him questions in English because he doesn’t understand Bangla. Sometimes he understands what she is saying, and sometimes he’ll look over at me and ill have to make what she said more understandable for him. But to me, it always sounds perfectly clear.” This story by Tan made me enjoy reading for the first time in a long time. 

What I have learned about myself as a writer in this term is that I have the potential of becoming a great writer. I say this because before I entered college, my essays were never really interesting to read. They also never had a good vocabulary in them or bad quotes, and I was always bad at writing my reasoning. I was a bad writer. Now, I’m not saying I’ve turned into a great writer, but I definitely improved since high school. My essays are well organized now, I start paragraphs with new thoughts and I don’t drag out my paragraphs for a page long anymore. I also don’t write in “second person” anymore. I have also learned how to follow format, and use better vocabulary in my sentences to sound more like a college student. I’m also better at keeping my audience more engaged in my writing, rather than boring them after reading my first paragraph. For example, in my annotated bibliography on schizophrenia I wrote, “Schizophrenics can have extreme psychotic symptoms. As I mentioned, hallucinations can be gruesome because the voices schizophrenics hear can be commanding, telling them to do insane and horrible things. Thankfully, antipsychotic medication helps lessen these symptoms which is one step closer to living a normal life.” It might not seem like much, but in high school, I would never have been able to write like this. Like I said before, my essays were always boring, but now I have the ability to hook readers into my writing. 

What I have learned about myself as a scholar in this term is that I am very hard-working. I was never a good student in high school or middle school. School just wasn’t important to me. But ever since I stepped foot into college, I got this sudden urge to grind and become the best version of myself academically. I think it’s because I’m closer to my future job than I ever was, and that college is way more serious than high school ever was. Or it’s because I have matured and grown up. Whatever the case may be, I’m glad I got that sudden urge and changed. I want to continue to grow and become smarter every term. I actually wrote about this in my educational narrative. I wrote, “I realized that I needed to change and become the best version of myself. My thoughts consisted of needing to do well in school to prepare for college, get a high-paying job, retire my dad, buy my parents a house, etc. I’ve always had these dreams and goals but I never actually put the time into achieving them.” These goals that I had a couple of months ago are still my goals today. They will keep being my goals until I achieve them and I won’t stop until I have achieved them. 

In conclusion, this semester has taught me so much about myself. My English course specifically has taught me that I am able to improve myself and learn to enjoy things that I never wished I would enjoy. Reading is a skill that is important to have. Reading helps with an individual’s memory, and focus. I used to have a short attention span, but ever since I started reading the short stories my professor would assign, I realized my attention span has gotten better. I learned to focus more on my task and completing it. I have also gotten better at researching. I would always ask for help with things I didn’t know or understand. It took creating the annotated bibliography to help me realize that Google was my oyster. In order to create the annotated bibliography, I had to do an immense amount of research to fully understand my topic. I had to find trusted sources to help me with finding factual information about schizophrenia. Now, I am able to find true information online by researching things that I need help understanding. This English course wasn’t just a course for my major that I needed, but a course that has helped me in ways to become a better reader, writer, and scholar.