My First Semester.

I remember that first day of college as a student at Southern. I can’t even to being to express how nervous I was. College is where everything starts to become real, and where you life starts falling in place. What if I’m the only one who doesn’t have a clue? What if I never find myself? Those were the questions that consumed my mind constantly, making me feel so uneasy.

                My first semester at college helped that though. I started my first week or so off with the mindset that I would hate it. I was never a school person at all. I never put really any effort into my work because I had close to zero interest in it. But I realized that if I wanted to get somewhere in life, then I needed to open up my mind about school. That was my first goal for the semester; to be more open minded. Most people’s goals are to get good grades. Not me, though. I just wanted to see a change in myself as a student. I’m proud to say that I came very far with working towards that goal. Even though I still have no plan for the future, no desired major, I still had positive thoughts about them for once. I realized that I shouldn’t get down on myself, because it’s okay to be confused and unsure about what to do. Also, I tried my best no matter what situation it was. I wanted to prove to myself that I can do it. That I can be positive with my school situation. That I can put a lot of effort into work and be happy with the result for once. I was so used to being compared grade wise with my twin sister. She always had better grades than I did. This was my chance away from her, my own school, my own grades to worry about. I did prove all of these to myself, which is such a nice feeling.

                 The first thing I learned about college was that it is nothing like high school. At all. I'm not a fan of change. So getting past the initial struggle was hard, but I can say that I adapted quickly. 

                Just like any college student, there are always some roadblocks getting in the way of you progress.  I struggled with time management in my beginning stage at school. I’m a night owl. I stay up until three in the morning every night. That does not mean that’s the best time to do work, though. At first I thought it was. I would save all my work until that moment, and I would be completely over tired and way too stressed to finish everything. I soon realized that I won’t show my full potential this way. So, I began to practice better time management skills. I would set reminders on my phone at a certain hour of the day to get something done, and I would. I can easily say that my biggest challenge turned into my biggest success. I took that challenge, that road block in my way, and worked on it to better myself and my work.  

                Along with all of this, I am also very proud of my grades and my performance in general. I was able to pull off midterm averages of B’s with a couple of exceptions. That made me so happy. I got though my first semester of college on a good note. But, the actual grade I received isn’t what’s most important. What is important is what I’ve learned. I’ve learned so much information that will be useful to me throughout my years at Southern. I can always look back on it with a positive outlook.

                If I didn’t open my mind, I probably would not be writing this blog post right now. Being so open minded about school is new to me, and I feel like this opened my eyes that I can be this way about anything else in my life. These blog posts helped me keep track of who I am, making me realize something new with every one of them. Next semester, I’m going to continue to try to find my way, and keep staying positive. I’m going to keep my grades up, and won’t let myself go downhill. I’m excited to see what the future brings me. 

Success & Failure.

I’ve had many successes and failures this semester. They all helped me learn and grow as a person. One success I’ve had is I’ve tried my best in all of my classes. I put a lot of effort into my work, even if it wasn’t as much as I should have. I still found the motivation to get everything done and put in my best work. I’m really proud of that. I’ve never been the type of person to give my all in a subject. But I realized that I should change that, which I did. I think that is definitely my biggest success. I can take away so much from this. I take away the motivation to continue this throughout next semester and the one to follow. I proved to myself that I can get things done and I can put my all into school if I try hard enough.

One of my biggest failures is putting things off so late. I procrastinate so much. For history, we would have big papers due and I would wait until the day before or two days before to write them. This caused so much stress on me. From this experience, I’m definitely going to take away a learning experience. I know I need to work on it. Also, not going to some classes all the time was a failure. This was especially in math class. I wouldn’t go to many of the classes because it was so boring, and so late. As a result, I missed a few unannounced quizzes that really affected my grade. From this I’m taking away that even if a class is boring, I should still continue to attend them because of the risk of a decrease in my grade. 

Final Project Brainstorming.

The final project is something that should be in the back of everyone’s minds. So far, I've been just brainstorming and writing down simple thoughts. I haven’t really done into detail with everything; I just want to get an idea of where I can go with the paper. I want to figure out how to make it interesting and unique. It seems like it’s going to take a lot of thinking and planning. In this project, I’m going to start off saying how I was before. Before I started college. Then I’m going to transfer into how I changed as a person and what I realized about myself. I've learned so much. I realized how much I put things off. I realized I need to change all of my bad school habits. I worked on that throughout the semester though. So I’ll go into detail about that.  A personal goal I had was to be more open with school and classes. Unfortunately, I’m still not open at all. But I realized that I’m just not the type of person that likes school. Next semester I want to continue working on that, and maybe find myself in a place where I found a subject that interests me. I want to include I’m going to make sure I make it personal and try to have it show who I am as a person, how I’ve grown, and what I need to work on.  

Video #3, Freshman 15.

For our final blog post, I wanted to try to make this one my best. I thought the topic was very interesting and could be done in so many different ways. I chose the freshman 15 and I’m happy with the way it came out. At first when I knew we had to make a skit, I was nervous because I hate doing that. But it ended up going very well and I had a lot of fun with it. I think I did a good job with explaining the problem, especially in the skit. That’s how many students are at southern because of the many options available. I could have included a little more information about the solutions, but I feel like what I did was enough. I also didn't want it to go over five minutes, so I had to cut a little out. Overall, I am very happy with myself with how this video turned out. I was so used to the technology used so it came so easy to me.

Creativity and Tharp's Perspective.

Tharp’s perspective is something that is very unique and creative. From her book, we can see how important creativity really is. Creativity is being able to use your imagination or come up with multiple different ideas to something. It’s the ability to think deeper about something. We gain so much knowledge about how important this is and also we realize things that we would never think about before reading the book. Like accidents. I liked this part because we realize that in order to be creative, we need to be prepared for something unplanned to happen. The creative aspect comes into play when you need to be able to think of a way to fix it. We can incorporate this into our everyday life when something unexpected happens in school work, or anything else. We shouldn’t just get bummed that nothing went as planned, while instead we should think of new options. Teaching creativity is hard, which is why it’s not taught in schools. It’s more of a personal thing. Not one person has the same creative habits as the other. It’s all personal. But, it can and should be taught to express it. Expressing creativity is so important and should be done more often instead of pushing people away from their creative self.

We need to attempt to be more creative. As an individual, I think I am personally a pretty creative person. It is important to surround yourself with creativity. People shouldn't be afraid of what others think. They shouldn't be afraid to take risks, to be wrong, to accept challenges or to come across failure. This is important because it shows how each person is different. You shouldn't be afraid to express yourself because of the fear of being judged. We need to become aware that there isn't only one way to do something. 

Autonomy.

                From our class in the library today, I learned a lot of useful information that I will keep in mind throughout my time here at southern. This was only my second time at the library, and the first I only walked in for a few minutes. Our assignment today was to search for a book on anatomy, find a journal article, and a definition of it on an online dictionary of encyclopedia. The book I found on anatomy was called “Anatomy of Public College”. The journal article was really interesting that I found. It was called “Faculty Motivation and Scholarly Work: self determination and self regulation perspectives”. This article was very interesting. It talked about motivation and how to fulfill basic needs of an individual. If you put your mind to something, you can get it done. It’s as easy as you are willing to make it. Anatomy is defined as “free will; self governing, ability of a person or a group to choose a course of action. Autonomy is a basic human right and is one of the principles of bioethics.” (oxford dictionary). Autonomy definitely applies to any first year students. As a first year student, you learn your own time management and what works the best for yourself. First year students need to discover themselves as an individual. You gain a lot of independence as a first year student, which is a part of what autonomy is. Autonomy is commonly defined as self determination, so as a first year student, you realize how important it is to be able to be able to get things done by yourself, and know what pushes you to do something. This is all very important for first year students to gain knowledge on, because it will only help them out throughout the college years. The lesson on autonomy today in the library I think was a very well start to our lesson on it. 

Campus Safari #16: Career Counseling

For this week’s campus safari, I went to the school’s career counseling. I gathered some information while I was there. The office hours are Monday to Friday from 8:30 to 4:30 pm. It is better to make an appointment, but sometimes if you just walk in they will have some available space. At the career counseling services you can talk to someone about anything career related. They will help you with anything like selection a major or finding a job. From what I saw I think this service would be very useful to many students. It will help them out so they feel like they have someone to guide them to the right direction career wise, because this is a common struggle for most students.