PAPA DIAGNE
JOSEPH FURLONG
FRESHMAN COMPOSITION
12/13/2022

College was a bit harder than I thought, I thought I would just be like high school and middle school, meaning that I didn’t need to study and I would just go through college easily. That is not the case at all, there is no way most people will pass college without putting lots of time in studying and the work that you do. It’s the same for writing, I can’t wait until the last day to write multiple pages or I will receive a bad grade. In college, I learned that time is everything, meaning that the more time you put into anything, the higher the chances of succeeding was what you were aiming for. For example, in the beginning, I didn’t think my math class was going to give me any problems so I didn’t put that much time into studying and it backfired. I failed the first 2 quizzes that I thought were easy and since then, I have done nothing but study for that class and since then, I haven’t failed any more tests or quizzes. Overall, I learned that time is money and if you waste money, it will backfire. To be honest, I came to college just to get my degree to apply to some good paying jobs. I chose computer science as my major just for money, I don’t care about becoming a hacker and all that, I just have a good job that pays well that is within my reach. I will not overwork myself if it is not worth it.

Overall, as someone who thought that my writing skills were bad, I did a little better than I thought. I thought that I would have to depend on the homeworks and reflections to increase my grade but that is not the case at all. Normally, when I write essays, I just want to finish it quickly, it doesn’t matter whether or not I did good on it, I just wanted to get rid of the assignment. I wanted to take the essays in the course seriously because the class is pretty much nothing but essays. And when I actually took my time, researched my topic and actually did the essay, I received an A, which I have never received before (I will only be mentioning the first essay since it’s the only essay that I know my grade of). Also peer reviews and talking to my classmates did help a ton, they helped me realize what I needed to fix to make my essay better. To make it worse, I didn’t even choose the best topic available. I could’ve chosen a serious topic like global warming, the russia and ukraine war but instead chose to write about my favorite nba player of all time: Stephen Curry also known as the greatest shooter of all time.

Based on the first essay, I can say that I can find resources pretty well. Even though I know it’s not hard to find, knowing which information to use and exactly where to look at is important, can’t just search up your topic and expect to find everything you need. Changing up the words, using different sources etc is important when looking for resources. I can also say I have improved on how to use rhetorical terms. To be honest, before college, I had never heard of rhetorical terms. I knew what audience, genre, background, author etc meant but I never knew those were rhetorical terms. I also never knew how important the usage of rhetorical terms is. Even knowing the author is important for knowing whether or not the article written is biased or not. Important stuff that people don’t take seriously is what is hurting their grades, rhetorical terms is one of those things. It gets ignored until you realize how important it is. Another important thing people usually ignore is brainstorming. For some reason many people would just go straight into writing and don’t brainstorm. Unless you know the topic you are doing well enough, people should just brainstorm many ideas until they realize that they fully understand the topic they are writing about. I thought I knew a lot about social media but thanks to social media, I learned new things that I didn’t learn before. In the end, the class made me realize that i knew more than I thought and thanks to the course, i realize that i was holding myself back and i need to make sure that i don’t doubt myself without trying first.

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