- Your first semester:
I have grown a lot both mentally and academically from the beginning of this semester to now. Mentally in the beginning, I felt as if I was lacking a lot in independence, and even though it is good to have friends and be around people you love constantly I think that now I have found joy in doing the small things on my own such as walking to and from class, eating, studying and just spending more time with myself in general. Academically I feel like I have learned a lot about the way my mind works when it comes to retaining information and studying. I have found that tutoring and asking a lot of questions as well as spending time in the library to do my homework is the best study habits that I’ve started.
One expectation that I had for this year was that I would just have more time in general. I felt like that this semester was going to go by slower and I would have more time to make mistakes a fix them as the year went by. This semester definitely did not go by slow at all. It definitely went by a lot faster than I expected and it didn’t leave me much time to make mistakes and learn from them as time went on. I had to quickly find ways to do better and succeed in the same way I knew I was capable of doing in the beginning. Something that I wish I knew 14 weeks ago was that It’s okay to be alone and work through hard times alone and that not every bad experience is the end of the world. Also, that time goes by extremely fast.
- Study Habits
My study habits have definitely changed from the beginning of the semester to now, I spend a lot of time in the library preparing for classes even if it’s not studying I still find it helpful for me to read through assignments before I have to start them. My study habits now consist of a lot more reading, reading, and rereading. It took me a while to find a new study habit that benefited my needs more while having more classes at once than I’m used to. I found myself forgetting material quickly because I would be changing subjects so fact. Repetition has definitely become my best friend and has now become my number one study tool. The library has very quickly become my favorite space to lock in on my school work and it wasn’t until recently that I started going. Next semester I will definitely be staying in the library more and finding new repetition based study habits.
- Health Professions Learning Community
In my opinion, these classes are tied together in the aspect of understanding that everyone in life is going through something, and whether it affects you or not it’s also beneficial to learn and know what others are going through. In SOC we learned a lot about why people are the way they are based on the environment that they were brought up in. Whether it was in a wealthy neighborhood, side effects of neglect, or even growing up in a poor area with little resources. They all tie together and give some sort of justification as to why people do the things that they do now. In CHEM I learned about the water crisis and how it affected thousands of people and the drastic measures that they had to go through just to get the basic need of clean water. This showed me that we still live in a world where people in the higher class strictly make decisions based on money and what benefits them the most. Though these are two separate citations they still have the common thread of everyone is going through their own situations but they all shape us into the people we are today and instead of going through life with the “It doesn’t affect me” mentality we should learn and try to understand before it’s us in those situations. The event that benefited me the most was Ted Ellis and his painting. This event tied together with a lot of what I was learning in my history class and listening to his stories and how he explained the facts provided me with a different perspective and help me retain the information even more.