Final Reflection Paper

 

I have made a conscious effort to think of college as a way to achieve independence. Throughout my first year of college, I was faced with a multitude of emotions and challenges. Originally when moving down to Mississippi, from Colorado, I was nervous to be by myself without really knowing anyone and without a roommate. In no time I got to meet many new people. I have faced many struggles which forced me to come up with solutions and gave me personal growth.

 

In Andre Delblanco’s article What Is College For?, he talks about how college increases economic competitiveness in those who constitute the nation. For me, I came to college to get a business degree and I believe so far I have become more competitive with my learning, especially in classes like Business Calculus or Business Law. In the next year, I have many business-specific classes and I will need to continue learning with competitiveness to ensure I am prepared for the business world.

 

 I have learned a lot, not just academically but about life in general. The way the pandemic affected school was unfortunate but I still got the most out of it. I have learned many new skills to adapt to living on my own and being responsible for myself. The number of responsibilities I had this year compared to my senior year of highschool was way greater. All these responsibilities and EDHE class made me learn how to manage my stresses properly. I know my classes next year will be much more difficult than it was this year so I expect to have a lot more studying to do. It will also be difficult shifting back to learning in person.

 

Living in a dorm by myself I had to keep myself in check and make sure I was always picking up after myself and keeping my room tidy. It was nice to have a dorm room to myself because it allowed me to have quiet study time when I needed it. There were many personal reflections that we wrote throughout this class which allowed me to reflect on everything that was going on in my first year and everything I was learning. 

 

Having to begin college with all online classes except one was hard, using websites I have never seen before and shifting to living by myself was a challenge. These challenges made me more flexible as a person. There were many websites that I was using for different classes so it was a huge task to make sure I had done everything on every website. In the first semester, I sometimes would accidentally forget to check a website one day and miss an assignment. The second semester I was better about organizing which assignments I need to do and when they are due. Because of this I feel I have greatly improved my skill of multitasking and having a more organized schedule. 

 

Although I came to college to create independence, I also came for self-fulfillment and to find new interest. With all the growth I have made, and all the new people I have met I have grown as a person. I have picked up new hobbies, tried new food, and watched sports I normally wouldn’t watch. It was really interesting to reflect personally on my interests at the beginning of the year and now. This has also applied to my learning, I have found myself being interested in subjects I didn’t expect to find interesting. In Edhe every morning we had the class we would start by meditating, I found this to be a great practice to clear your mind at the beginning of the day so you can proceed to have a productive and enjoyable day. 

 

Throughout the year I have developed some pretty sturdy study routines. I enjoyed walking to the library when I had to write papers to have a quiet space for thinking. Another place I loved to study was the grove when the weather is nice. One thing I started doing every week was creating a virtual sticky note on my desktop which had a list of all the assignments I had due in the future and how big they were. 

 

One assignment I enjoyed doing was the multimodal presentation because it made me work on my ability to present from a single slide and no script. When doing this I had written a script and rehearsed it many times, when recording it I messed up many times and would stop when I went off-script. On my final take of it, I accidentally went off script but I ended up liking what I said better than what I had initially written on my script. This showed me that even if you make a slight mistake in public speaking it’s easy to cover it up and continue going with what you know about the subject. 

 

After all, I came to college to create independence which I indeed did, but I had a great time doing it. I found many new tasks and hobbies I would’ve never imagined I would have. I enjoyed learning about classes I didn’t think I would find interesting. There are many reasons why someone would come to college, I have learned many things about myself and the world around me. Especially being in a place I have never been before allowed me to explore. This first year has created great personal growth for me.

After reading the article What Is College I had some questions, my first question was: If college wasn’t important what would our world look like?. My initial reaction was surprised at the beginning of the article with the initial paragraphs but as the article progressed I was very informed. One thing I found very interesting was how the author talked about the view of being educated.

 

After reading The Third Education Revolution I was surprised. There were many things that surprised me but especially when the author talked about how the world of work is undergoing a massive shift. This article connected me to Courtney E Martin’s ted talk when she brought up the new American dream and how we should work.

1. I feel like I have developed many skills, one skill more than most was self dependency. This whole first year has been the longest I have been without having parents or siblings to be by my side to help me through things and I have developed a very strong independence to be able to take care of issues on my own. When it comes academically my ability to research information and present it in a professional way has improved, another thing has that has improved has been being able to create a presentation.
2. At first I wasn’t sure if my learning matched up with my expectations, I figured I would be in more business centered classes. Now I have realized what the learning is doing for me and I understood why I was taking general classes.
3. I need to continue working on my work ethic and procrastination because there is still sometimes where I will wait till the last minute to start working on and I have become more aware of that but I still need to work on that.
4. I will use these skills with my ability to speak to people and have conversation in business and in life. I think these skills will allow me to create and elaborate.
5. I think my synthesis essay best illustrate my ability to follow instructions and use sources against and for each other in writing. In business calculus I believe my test grades display my ability to work with numbers.

1. For my presentation I cut a lot out that sounded like a research paper, I used the more argumentative sentences and information for my presentation in order for it to persuade the audience.
2. I learned how to address informative pictures in a presentation without reading directly from the screen. I have presented to my friends in order to feel comfortable with my speech.

1. I think learning how to include research and embed it into a paragraph was the most important thing for this essay because it allows me to smoothly reference sources and creates organization within a paragraph.
2. I used most of my sources that were in my annotated bibliography as planned except some of my scholarly sources, I need to add more statistics to those.
3.  I learned how to create a strong tone to persuade the reader to my argument and also what tone to use in certain situations.
4. I think the Edblog post on Courtney E Martin really got me thinking about the possibilities of a different work world and many things she mentioned in her Ted talk about businesses and mental health at work allowed me to see how we could change the way we work.

In my argument essay, I need to separate ideas in my middle paragraphs and reorganize my train of thought throughout the paper. I switch ideas a couple to many times in a single paragraph.

Most of the working class is affected by my prediction of increased working from home. A day in life would be: wake up and get showered and prepared for your day. After this make a good breakfast and read emails while eating breakfast to set up a schedule for the day ahead. After this, it would be to send your kids off to school for the day if they have them. Now they can have peace and quiet to complete work and attend online meetings. Once there is a stopping point in the schedule they are able to walk to their kitchen to prepare their own lunch, then continue to work while they eat lunch. After getting more work done their kids(if they have them) will arrive home from school and they can find some time to take a break and spend time with their kids. If their kids play sports they can send them off to those and continue working or even go watch their kids sporting events and continue working later. The online workday can be flexible to the whole family’s daily schedules.

I think my own blindspots are that not many employees will return to in-person work, I think although companies can put work online it would still require in-person meetings and presentations when meeting in person has no risk I believe there will be some reasons for employees to come in certain days. I think another blindspot I have is people without a college degree have less of a chance to work from home.

For my argument essay, I need to focus on organization because that was my worst part of my synthesis essay. I also need to improve my research I have done on the subject because I am missing a couple scholarly sources. One thing I think I will do good on is introducing my argument and giving important viewpoints about the argument. I will need to attend more office hours in order to work on orginization.

I think the most relevant things for my topic I am arguing have been Courtney E. Martin’s ted talk because it really made me question the way people work and how that can affect their mental health. Another thing that was relevant was the bumble one, trying to find friends in the pandemic can be hard and that made me realize how much life has changed since Covid-19. Also Activism in the social media age allowed me to realize how quickly things are able to change with spreading word of mouth on the internet. All these concepts have allowed me to understand the overall impact of the pandemic and how American’s can change the way they live and continue to live after the pandemic. Another relevant thing was reading statistics on who is currently working from home and how this affects their lives.