I am not entirely sure what I was expecting from the course upon entering ENG 1121, but it was not at all like the experience I had in ENG 1101. The latter was held over Zoom, where poor connection on my side was frequent, and we were only required to do one research assignment at the end of the year – a PowerPoint presentation about virtually anything of interest to us. Even though in concept that was a nice project idea, it was generally done with minimal effort from everyone and did not require a lot of deep thinking. Even I felt I was rushing through the work and not putting enough self–reflecting thoughts into it. This was pretty much the opposite of this year’s ENG 1121, where deep reflective thinking was required of everyone and the students were encouraged and pushed to think critically and creatively about the output they produced. I found that to be a pleasant surprise, and actually made me enjoy the class quite a bit, which is rare, considering I have felt fairly neutral about almost every English course I have taken.

I view this class as an excellent course to practice for producing creative output based on personal thoughts, opinions, and feelings, which again I have seldom done in my other English courses, at least in the format it is done here. I do not believe this class fundamentally changed me as a reader or writer, as my styles for both remain fairly consistent, but it undoubtedly added to my skill set for both roles. Starting with Project 1, which was on discourse communities, I explored my duality of pursuits as a student of both music and mathematics. Frankly, I have never heard of discourse communities before, and learning about them in class was an interesting experience, so creating a piece of writing on it was something new that I have not done before. This project gave me mental space to ponder about my circumstance with maths and music and even about my near and far futures. I have not done many projects in general that involved such a degree of self reflection, but this project and even class in general pushed me to truly reflect, and I greatly appreciate that aspect of the class.

In addition, there is generally not a lot of opinionated work that I write, and exploring this style in Project 2 was a nice experience – I enjoyed the process of researching data that I seldom observed before and creating two pieces out of it. I have always felt a certain way about mathematical education, but I never quite created a piece about it, and this class allowed me to explore just that, and it ended up as something I liked. This genre was my favourite of all the work we did in class, and it is something I definitely would like to explore in my own time, so I appreciate this project being assigned in this course.

I have never created an infographic in my entire life, and I did not know how to make one nor how relatively easy it was until I did Project 3, which was  based on research done for the preceding project. Even though this skill may not be entirely English related, it was entirely new to me and I am glad to have learned it, as it may be of great use later in life, or perhaps even soon. The skill of organising the most important points in an attractive manner is a generally very useful skill  to have, and I again appreciate this course for introducing me to a new format of research presentation.

In general, my main takeaway from this class is to always think critically about where you are heading with your ideas, all the aspects and possible responses to it, and then even further analysis based on that. As I mentioned, I felt fairly neutral in nearly all of my prior English classes, so the atmosphere in them has not affected me much for the most part. But this class was on the contrary very enjoyable and I really appreciated the creative atmosphere and reflective mindset, which pushed every student to produce great works that effectively showed off their strengths as writers. I am definitely going to carry this mindset with me in my future, and I will approach my future writing endeavours with the same degree of reflection and critical thinking as I did in this English course.