My name is Jessica but I prefer to be called Jess for short 🙂 My parents are from El Salvador but I was born and raised in New York City. My major is Communication Design and will strive to open up my design-related business in the near future. I have three major goals for the semester: 1) practice drawing any chance I get (I am a horrible illustrator at the moment haha!) 2) manage my time wisely (I HATE it when I am unorganized with my time) and 3) learn to breathe more haha! (seriously, to not stress over everything as far as assignments, work, relationships etc. Just overall, enjoy life at the moment and just breathe in and out 🙂 ) Sometimes at night, I like to walk around my neighborhood and reflect. It helps me appreciate all things around me and helps me become less stressed. 

The usual path I walk to reflect 🙂

My strengths and weaknesses as a reader and writer varies.

I personally believe that my strengths as a reader is identifying the elements within a story and analyzing the concept of each piece. As a writer, I feel confident writing in first, second and third person. I can express myself well through writing and can gather all my thoughts on paper. The only weakness I feel that I have as a reader is when I encounter a piece of literature that does not capture my attention at all. When I am challenged to read anything that does not interest me, my mind wanders to different places and no matter how many times I read it, I could not grasp the main idea of the story. Because of this weakness, I have practiced to overcome it; I now visualize the stories as I read them, and try my best to visualize them as if it were a movie. I am a visual artist after all. My two major weakness in writing are grammar use and correct use of punctuation marks. I try to overcome this weakness by reading more, but it takes a day at a time.

I feel comfortable with technology. I can alternate between a PC and MAC computer and am proficient in illustrator, photoshop, dreamweaver and indesign.

I have very little knowledge on the topic of utopias and dystopias. As I grew older I perceived “Utopia” as a place where perfection is located. Of course, I do not believe in anything being perfect so the idea of Utopia never developed pasted that. I am taking this course (ENG 2000) because it is a required course but although that is the main reason why I enrolled, I am pleased to learn more on Utopias and Dystopias 🙂 I hope to learn the history of Utopia and how Dystopia was developed, what was the perceptions on both topics at the beginning and now in history? Also, I am very pleased that we will be writing a lot in this course as it will help my writing skill to develop more.

Best, Jess 🙂