As a freshman in college, I have been able to watch myself grow over the past year since I graduated high school. The person I am now is not the same person who walked across the stage and received a high school diploma almost a year ago. I have changed so much since being in college, from changing the type of people that I hang out with to changing the way that I view things. I also have changed things that did not work for me in high school so that I could become a better person in the future. One thing that I’ve learned to do more of this year alone is express myself more and not be ashamed to do so. I have changed as a person, and I’ll be the first to tell you. I don’t believe that changing was a bad thing either. I enjoy who I am now and respect myself more as a person. I surround myself with those who accept me for me and I do not feel as if I have to walk on egg shells around them. Something that college has helped me with is that I am not as tense of a person, and even though I’m still a people pleaser, I know that I do not have to make people happy twenty-four seven, especially if they do not like me for who I truly am.
The reason I say all of this is because not only can I mentally tell that I have changed as a person, but it is very evident in my writing as well. At the beginning of my freshman year I wrote from a point of view of this timid little girl who was starting college and had no clue what she was doing. I know that I was a girl who was just starting college and had no clue where the path was going to go, but my writing was weak even for a freshman in college. Now, as a young lady who is about to start her sophomore year of college, my writing has become more open and it flows better. I’m able to connect to the audience unlike I was before, my grammar skills have improved, and the whole writing process comes easier to me now than it did at the beginning of the year. There is purpose behind my writing unlike in the past, and I know that I have found my purpose and why I’m in college. I’m excited that my future includes writing, even if I don’t know exactly how. I enjoy writing more than I ever have, and I know that it will change and develop into even better writing over the next couple of years as I continue my education at the University of Mississippi. I’m thankful for classes such as WRIT 101 and WRIT 102 where I had the opportunity to be pushed as a writer.
The reason that I was able to become a better writer in WRIT 101 and WRIT 102 was because they were both classes that were more difficult than writing classes were in high school, which I had gotten comfortable with. Even though both classes were difficult in many different way, for me, WRIT 102 was slightly a little more difficult than WRIT 101 was. It was not until second semester, when I started WRIT 102, that I had actually noticed that I had fully changed as a person. I had slightly noticed little changes right before Christmas break when I was still in WRIT 101, but I was still hiding behind the little girl that I was when I started college. When I began WRIT 102 we were required to purchase a book called Rethinking America. In the book there were topics or issues about American society today and articles of what people thought about it. Some of these topics were easy to talk about with a class and some, not so much. Having a class discussion about how cyberbullying has become more of an issue and how wrong it is, does not bother anyone, but as soon as you start talking about feminism and racial issues everyone sinks back in their seats and decides to become quieter than a church mouse. Since we had purchased this book and were assigned to read articles out of it, we started to have in class discussions about the topics and issues. Doing this made me start to think more in depth about the subjects that I was writing about, and that was when I noticed the change internally. Some of the topics that I would have never been able to speak about as a high schooler were some of the topics that I found the easiest to write or talk about. Take racial issues for instance, in high school I would have been too timid and too scared to speak about what I thought on the topic, but now I will gladly have a conversation with anyone about how racism is an issue today. Because of WRIT 102 I was growing as not only a writer but as a person as well. Since the content that we discussed in WRIT 102 was more mature lead to us writing on more mature topics in our papers. Because of WRIT 102 I had to write about topics that I not only supported fully, but I also had to write about topics that I completely stood against. The assignments that pushed me the most were the ones that I did not support. I realized this year that it is easy to write about something when you support it, but you realize how well of a writer you truly are when you have to write on a topic that you do not agree with.