Discourse communities are a very strong and powerful group of people who share and connect a lot of common values and activities. Basketball and my major here at City Tech hospitality management are discourse communities that I feel very differently about but still apply to my everyday life.
Basketball is a discourse community I feel I am strongly a part of. I associate myself with the basketball community because I’ve been watching and playing the sport since I was young. My understanding of the complexity, detailed terminology, statistics, and movement of the sport only leads me to have more confidence and a larger sense of belonging in the community. My favorite NBA teams are the Memphis Grizzlies and Oklahoma City Thunder. A large part of this is because when I was young my uncle used to always make me play with random teams in NBA 2K12. I’ve been playing NBA2K, which is a basketball video game series (2K12 being the 12th one made), since I was six years old. But one time I won with those teams I started to take a liking to them. I was introduced to the video game first then the actual sport on tv which is when I first discovered my favorite player Kevin Durant. He played for the Oklahoma City Thunder, and around this time won the Most Valuable Player award on his way to compete for an NBA championship. I’ll never forget how heartbroken I was when Kevin Durant signed to the Golden State Warriors in the offseason of 2016. At first I was heavily frustrated because as a diehard Oklahoma City Thunder fan I lost all hope for our winning chances next season because he was practically the best player on the team and I loved watching him play with the players on the team. But I later understood the reason he left was because the Thunder kept losing and he was going to the Warriors who were arguably the best team at the time, with a lot of stars and just coming off a championship win last year. Basketball is also something that runs throughout my family as most of my family members have been on teams throughout their academic careers whether it being high school or college basketball. A lot of my family members have also been on AAU teams, which stands for Amateur Athletic Union. AAU is an organization based in America consisting of several sports where kids and teens are developed and compete in an effort to improve or strengthen their skills. A common language in basketball that makes me feel more connected to this discourse community is the phrase “And-1”. This commonly refers to when a player gets fouled while making a shot and then goes to the free throw line to shoot one free throw. Also a lot of abbreviations of stats or games like 3P% which means 3 point percentage, 2K which is short for NBA2K the video game, and PER which stands for player efficiency rating.
The second discourse community I don’t feel so much a part of is here at City Tech which is my major Hospitality Management. I don’t think I really belong in that discourse community yet because there’s still a lot of terminology I have to learn and knowledge about managing certain things around that management profession. I feel like there are so many jobs in the Hospitality Management category that all have their own shared language and terminology that I didn’t think of when I first chose for this to be my major. I remember my first semester here at City Tech which was just a couple months ago where I went on a trip to a hotel with my Perspectives in Hospitality Management class in Manhattan. The goal of the trip was for us to learn all about the new hotel being worked on and everyone’s job within it. I feel like I was an outcast there because a lot of other students were familiar with the language and phrases in which the tour leader was saying and I was just kind of in the middle of it all. For example some categories in Hospitality Management are food and beverage management, tourism, lodging, front office, and hotel. At first I thought some of these were under the same branch and didn’t require much knowledge of certain things such as the terminology used around coworkers and customers. I also didn’t have a specific goal of what category of hospitality management I wanted to do so I wasn’t aware of all the different things it had to offer. During that same trip though I did learn some easy terminology like ADR which means average daily rate, ARI which means availability rate index, and B&B which means bed and breakfast. This gave me hope that if I can’t get the more simpler ones the harder ones would come to me along the way. This type of experience I had at the hotel is somewhat similar to the text “Hers”. The author states,”…it was exciting for me to discover that I’d finally cracked the code, that I could understand what doctors said and wrote and could use the same formulations myself.” This relates to me because I was excited I understood some of the terminologies and shared abbreviations in the Hospitality management field even though it was the small ones it made me want to use it more and try harder to understand the rest. Another reason I feel like I don’t belong in this discourse community is because I don’t have a lot of experience working or talking in a hospitality business environment. Although this is my first year of college I feel like everyone usually has a good sense of what they already want to do and how to go about it. However, on the other hand, I just feel like I’m diving in head first winging everything with no plan just trying to figure everything out and make it the best possible thing for me. So going into it straightforward head first I felt like I put myself at a disadvantage while also just not knowing some things incorporated in Hospitality Management. It is a community I do want to be a part of but I just feel like it is gonna take time for me to understand all the different shared languages and be versatile in my field.
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