Month: January 2015

Journal 1

This assignment was fairly easy to me. My group decided to do Perry Library. The library is well known  by most students at ODU  and is a common learning and studying facility. Some students spend most of their time in the library, when they are not in class.  In my part of the presentation, I did evaluating the facility. I had to answer a question. ” what suggestions do you have to those who are in charge of the facility?” That was hard for me to answer, because the times that I have been in the library I never saw anything that needed to be changed. The staff was very helpful and they even offer tutoring. So what more could I ask for? This is a challenging assignment for me because I absolutely do not like to talk in front of people. It is hard for me to make eye contact and I tend to talk really fast. There have been times where I have practiced giving a presentation in front of my friends.  Everything has went great, but once I get in front of people I don’t  know I forget everything I practiced. I try to stare at things in the back of the room, or just focus on a few people but that doesn’t work either. Hopefully this presentation will be different since it with a group, and we actually work well together. All of my group members have done there parts, and we all made sure we knew what we were doing. We all shared our work with one another and gave feedback on how it sounded. My group is very helpful to one another, and everything is going as planned, and our presentation should be finished by this weekend.

The Transition: Essay 1

The Transition

 

The transition from high school to college was a major shock and a very big change from what I was used to in high school.  I lived in a very small town and went to a school that had a graduating class of 60. And then coming to a university that has a population of 25,000 was mind blowing. It took some time to get use to, so many different faces all the time, because where I lived everyone knew each other here I’m lucky if I know fifty people. Getting the hang of things at first was overwhelming and it still is at times.

The high school that I went to barley prepared us for college. The faculty/ staff still treated some of us like little kids. We were always reminded when homework was due and when our next test was. In college you have to be responsible for that by your own self. Your professors don’t constantly remind you when an assignment is due. The work we had to do was mediocre compared to what I have to do now in college. Sometimes I wonder if my college transition would have been a little bit easier if the work I had to in high school was a little bit more challenging.

For college you definitely have to be prepared academically, physically, and mentally. You go from knowing just about everybody in your hometown to knowing no one at all. Once we were the oldest at our school then we go back to being the youngest. Which is really a big change. The classrooms get a whole lot bigger. No longer is it just fifteen students in one class now its 100 or more. Mentally you have to prepare yourself for that because your teacher may not even know who you are when there are that many people in one class. It is now your responsibility to ask for help on anything you don’t understand because your professor won’t know and could probably care less if you don’t speak up.  I can say I was physically prepared because I am a very independent person. I do what I am supposed to and go to class when  I  have class. So getting up for class or even deciding to go to class is very easy for me. Me personally I don’t need a constant reminder all the time I just get it done.

The transition from high school to college was challenging at first, I had to get used to not having my parents around, and having total freedom. I can say my first semester at college was great, and you learn a lot about yourself. Even though my high school didn’t prepare me academically, physically, and mentally I think I am doing a pretty good job. Even though my transition wasn’t easy, all of my professors have been very helpful. Somebody is always there to help you, and make sure that you are on the right track to success.

 

Journal 1

I really enjoyed doing peer-review.I think doing peer review is something we should do with every essay. Not only do you get other peoples point of view on your paper,but you also get to see some of their ideas, that may help you with your next essay.It was very interesting to me reading others papers and seeing some of the things I  had in common with other people in my group.My group and I all wrote about how the high schools that we went to didn’t really prepare us for college, and what obstacles we faced once we got to college.My group gave back very good feedback, they were very nice with the things they said, and helpful. They told me things that were very good with my paper, and things that needed to be fixed. I thought I gave back really good feedback. I wasn’t harsh with the things I said, I just told them things that would be helpful to them, I also told them things that were good about their papers. As I revise my paper I want to make sure I don’t have any grammatical errors, that everything sounds correct, and that I made sure I stayed on the topic throughout the whole essay. I made sure that I had a thesis statement, topic sentence, and a conclusion. In my essay I do have a few minor mistakes that shouldn’t be in there at all, but  I will be working on that, trying to fix it and asking my other peers on how my essay sounds, and what should be changed.