The Story of a Semester!

The Story of a Semester!

This first semester of my freshman year at Southern Connecticut State University has been a whirlwind of events. I swear I cannot believe it is already going to be December break. I want to go back to the very beginning for you, to tell you about my experiences here and what I have learned about myself and my school work. I would really like to really reflect on my academic time here so far. Lets go on a virtual road trip!

            I think I will start off by talking about the struggles that I have faced this semester so far. My biggest challenge has definitely making time to do my homework instead of doing other more entertaining things. I know that school comes first but there would be times I would find myself slacking or giving into other temptations such as hanging with friends or going out. Everyone knows in college the more you study the better you do so I should have spent extra time on my work. Often, I would find myself saying “Oh its not due for another two days so I can go out tonight”. However this would bite me in the ass later because I would have to stress to get it done the next day.

Another challenge I faced was staying organized. This is always hard because there are assignments that are continuous that you always need to remember to do (blogging) while at the same time you are getting new assignments every day. Sometimes it feels like its never ending, the second one thing is assigned and you go to do it, three more things pop up. So making sure I kept on top of all the work heading my way without accidentely forgetting something here or there was hard to do at times.

Around the middle of the semester I realized that I was slipping into this problem a little more than usual and decided to turn things around. I started writing out every assignment in my notepad and plan for weeks ahead. Every week I would write the things I already knew were due and then add the day to day assignments as they came. Yet there were always times where I would still get lazy or frustrated and give up on something. It is also very easy to make the excuse “I am so tired, I will get up early tomorrow and do it before class.” But let me tell you, this never works. For me at least, I cannot get out of bed early to do homework, it never has worked and I do not believe it will.

Despite this, I would also like to reflect on the good that I have done. I am very proud to say that I have been getting A’s on test and projects. I have overall become much better at staying organized, writing everything down and sucking it up and getting what needs to be done, done. I also have been known to get ahead, whether it reading or studying for the chapter in Psychology. I think my biggest achievement over all though was not giving up, it was always easy for me in High School to become unmotivated. This year although I would mess up from time to time I really stayed focused and pushed through my desire to say F*$& this.

Speaking of achievement, this semester I picked up some good habits; one is asking for help. I always used to hate to go for extra help because I did not want to look stupid. This year I began going to Math extra help and writing conferences. I asked people around me for assistance as well. My last movie I had to make I asked a CC named Jason to help me because he was very good at making videos and technological stuff and it ended up paying off. Now I don’t make this too much of a habit because I always do whatever I can do first and only when I absolutely need help will I ask.

This has helped me with my goal that I set for myself this semester. My goal was to do the best that I could do. Of course there is always something extra that I could have put into it but overall I am somewhat satisfied. So I did fall somewhat short because if I did as good as I possibly could I would always he doing work for hours on end. Which to me is a little unrealistic but I did put a lot of effort and work into my classes. I also balanced my social and work life relatively well so for that I am happy as well.

From here I simply want to continue to do well and not let the workload stress me out. To take it how it is and work my butt off. I need to say no sometimes and buckle down. Sometimes I really let the little things distract me, even if they are not at all very exciting. The most important thing is to remember to keep my mind on education and always put that first. I am not paying all this money to goof off. Improvement is always possible as long as I work towards it. My new goal is to keep this mentality up and step up my game even higher for the next semester!

Congratulations to everyone who finished their first semester in College!

Keep up the good work !

Last Safari

This week I attended the co-ed soccer game at More-Field House to support my friends. This past Thursday was the final play offs. It was nice to go and support people I know. They were competing against each other but I was rooting for three different teams at the same time. Of course I rooting for the Cool Runners though, they won the first game they played and then the team South of the Boarder won their game as well. Therefore, it was down to Cool Runners and South Of The Boarder which was their biggest competition. The cool runners had two people injured and one who was sick but still played a good game. They ended up loosing but it was a close game and very entertaining to watch. I saw people from my classes and a lot of other faces. I enjoyed going to watch and being apart of activities happening at Southern.

Success and Failure

I was asked to reflect on my greatest success and failure from this semester so I will briefly go into this without taking away from my final project because I also need to talk on that. It is hard to say that there is just one success or one failure that stood out the most overall. However I will start off with my greatest failure. I believe that my greatest failure this semester would definitely be surrounding math. That is the only class that I am not happy with my grade. I did not want anything below a B- throughout my college career yet have already fell below that. Coming into college I already knew that math would be a challenge for me but I could have put a lot more work into it. I feel as though I did not do so much work in that class because it wasn’t required. In class the professor writes out equations on the board the whole time and we do not do any ourselves. On top of that we do not have any homework so there is no outside required work. That hurt my grade and also made it easier to not work hard for that class. Yet it should have been the opposite. It was hard for me to sit down and go through everything myself because I was hating the class and hating the subject. I would have to say that my biggest success this semester is staying on top of all my subjects and pulling myself together to organize and get what needed to be done, done. Of course there were some slip ups but I got my work done and stayed on top through the stress and other temptations. Some people slip into the college experience and let their work stay on the back burner. 

Final Project Check Up

To be honest I have not yet started the final project but I already know I am not doing a video. Therefore there is not much brain storming that needs to be done. I will go down the list and answer each question in a note pad. Then I will find a theme maybe or some way to connect it in a fluid story that will not be so dry and just one answer after another. Once I do that, the ball will be rolling. I have not started the project yet not because I am procrastinating but because I have so much other work and studying to be done. Trying to wrap up all the final assignments, tests, projects and getting organized for finals. The thing that I am not sure about is what type of four pictures am I going to include in the essay. This is because I am just talking about my progress so how can I really put interesting pictures to that? This is something I will ask about and other peers in class on Thursday when we work on our projects in class. So the making it interesting part will be somewhat of a challenge. I feel as thought that is easier for someone who is doing a video. But I will give real and insightful thoughts and reflections on my progress and experience this semester at Southern Connecticut State University.

Writing Center

I went to the writing center to get help on an essay for English 112.The essay was about Fast Food restaurants and how they mistreat their workers. The assistant who helped me was named Sarah. She was very friendly and helped me organize my idea to set up and have an essay that flowed more fluently. I enjoyed the experience but personally I like meeting with my own teacher because she knows exactly what she wants and I know if I do that I will get the good grade. With the writing center I feel as though I sometimes second guess the editing they do because I'm not sure if that is exactly what my teacher would want. Overall it was a good experience and if I could not schedule an appointment with my teacher i would definitely use this resource again.

Final Reflection on "The Creative Habit"

We can gain a lot from Tharp's perspective about not only creativity but also autonomy. She depicts creativity in a different way than we would normally think of it. Most times when one thinks of creativity we think only of art work, painting and projects. But her book focuses more on how to find your own creative habits not only in art but in your life in general. She shows that creativity to her is more of a self driven thing. To her you have to know your goals and drive yourself to achieve all that you want to in your creative projects. To her it represents individualism and who she is as a person and she wants us to find our own too and rely on our own ideas. This is important because it helps you learn about yourself and after you learn about yourself, you learn to stick with it and not be afraid to express these ideas. To be free of fear and create without inhibition. You get to really know your desires and wants which can help you not only with your individual creativity but also with other aspects of life. Anything you do in life that helps you to find your identity is worth it, I feel as though some people spend their whole life not knowing who they are. The more you know and understand who you are the freer you are to be creative with your ideas. Twyla Tharp also talks about how you can incorporate this more into our lives by doing those exercises she put after every chapter. They are there to expand your boundaries and incorporate this “theory” of creative habit into your everyday life. This is something we all should do because it will better ourselves and make for a more interesting creative society. 

College/Life Problem

This will be my final video for this class, thank goodness. I am not the best at making videos but I still put in my effort. We had to do a video on a problem college student’s face but I feel as though we have already talked about the major obvious ones. At first I was going to do a video on sex and what to do if your roommate is having sex all the time but then i decided to change it to STD’s because that is a world problem. I feel like a lot of problems you have at college you will have out in the real world, after all this is a transition to the adult "real" world. Throughout my video I liked my music choice all though it would be nice if I could manipulate the sound volume throughout the whole thing but it does not allow you to do that. I think the video clips go well with the story and add some humor. Something that could have been better is that sometimes the words linger too long and show up on the next picture but that was not how it looked until the movie downloaded so I could not fix it. The movie is much more fluid then my previous ones and overall I am happy with the outcome.