Author: Thiek (Page 1 of 7)

Looking through all of my work from this term, I can see my mental growth. I can see me going from being shy and worried about the things I thought I shouldn’t share about my personal life. I can see the transition that led me into being a free thinker and a creative writer. I started using my own experiences and my personal problems to make topics that would help me with my writing. In all, I’ve learned a lot about myself as a student and a writer. I think during this term, writing stopped feeling like a duty or as if I’m solely doing this for a grade into a safe space for myself—a place where whatever I felt or whatever emotions I couldn’t voice, I was able to write. It allowed me to not only reflect on myself as a writer but as a person.I think there’s a large group of things I’ve learned over this term that I can use to help me in my process throughout college and my personal life, such as understanding and getting past procrastination. For me, it’s always been something I’ve struggled with, but over time in class, I’ve learned ways to better apply myself, be more present and aware of the opinions I put out, and my choice of words not only while I’m speaking but also in my writing. Procrastination has been a problem for me since middle school. I’ve always struggled with keeping myself grounded or entertained by my work, but the mental building that we had a chance to go through and the readings that we had a chance to look through in the beginning of the term helped me build a mental toughness. I know what I can do when I’m at my full capacity. I know how good of a speaker I am, and I know I have the qualities to be a good writer.  But procrastinating was not the only thing holding me back. My structure and my grammar also affected me a lot throughout the term. Being able to revise and reflect onto my work, even after we went over the writing structures in class, showed me what I was missing. In a way, I’m happy that I’ve been able to notice the areas I struggle in, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t upset by how easy these problems were to change. If I would have taken the step of being more hands-on with my work, better analyzing my work, and before having the teacher tell me I need to look over my work, me doing it myself, taking that initiative on my own, would

have saved me. I started off the year strong, and my grades began to decline. I can make a million excuses, and some of them are justified, but above it all, I should have applied myself way more because I know I can do more. I know what’s being asked of me, and now I know how to better apply myself for next time. The skills that I picked up in class, I transferred to all my classes—my studying skills, my writing and analyzing skills. I’ve realized just how much paying attention to the work we put out actually matters, and it’s saved me a ton.As far as using what I’ve learned this term in my community, I understand how to better communicate with people. I look at conversations, emails, articles, and even text messages differently now that I understand tone and genre. I will continue to apply myself and these habits into my day-to-day life. One of the best things that I’ve learned from this term was the way different people with different backgrounds and different perspectives on learning showed us their growth as students. This helped me to better adapt into this coming school year. Seeing that made me reflect on my own challenges—being an immigrant while trying to find my own footing in this country, having to create my own learning mechanics to be successful, understanding I had no choice but to do what’s best for not me but my family. For me, that was finishing school. I think this whole term as a whole has helped me become a better student, a better writer, a better listener, I came into this school year seeing as just any other era class but I was wrong this was my most hand to hand class that I got a chance to be apart of this semester and its allowed me to find a very intense creative side of me