Kiara, Human Services major, Auburn WA
Over the course of time, I have developed a sense of humor with a dash of common sense in my writing. As a writer, the development of my sense of humor is shown through my work by making my writing entertaining. I do not want one of my classmates to read my work and get super bored. As a person, I think I am outgoing, so I think my work should be too. As for my teacher, if they have over 100 papers to read, I am going to make sure mine sticks out, so they remember what mine was about and can reference the topic easily.
In life, I want my writing to stick out too because it is based on my personal life. When it comes to writing things out of school, for example in a diary or journal, I like to be able to write down exactly how I feel and explain in all force detail what I am explaining. A challenge I still face when it comes to writing is having others read my writing. I take my writing prompts inside and outside of class to be very personal. It is, in a way, me trying to reach out to others with my personal life. With having the fear of someone reading my work, I think that comes with lack of trust. When trust comes into hand, I think it is important to have people I trust so I do not get offended easily, but at first, I had to be vulnerable with people to learn I can trust them. During winter quarter, I have been able to get past the challenge because I had a trustworthy partner who understood where I was coming from. In project one, I wrote about this challenge. A quote I stated in my paper was, “So, throughout elementary school, I had to attend E.L.L classes to help with my ability to write and read. I think because of those classes, I have the fear of my teachers check my writing because I know my writing abilities probably don’t match kid’s my age. It also did not help that I would overthink about my writing and rewrite it about six times before thinking it is right” After we had to switch papers with our partner, I learned that she had the same problem. It was that exact day, I understood that I was not the only one with the same struggle.
From attending Western Washington University, I hope to be majored in Human Services and be able to move forward with being able to help improve the health of the youth. I hope in the future I can find a job that has to do with working with kids and maybe counseling combined. Maybe not just the idea of counseling kids because sometimes when kids are pushed to go to counseling session, I feel like they do not want to tell the truth or tell all details because they are scared. I want to be able to provide an area of space where they can feel safe and be able to be ambitious about what they choose to share from their life.
From being in English 101, I think it has prepared me for my career later in life due to having to work with others. When working with my partner, I was able to learn more about her and work out little details on how we can work together to make our projects easier when splitting up the work. Both side had to contribute an even amount of work for the projects to work out fairly. I think that can work with my career because to do what I want to do in the future involves one person to listen and one person to talk, and in the end together we can problem solve together. An example of working together was for project four, my partner made a google docs and shared it with me, so we could work together. We had split the sections, so we could evenly share doing the work, instead of having just one-person type everything all up. English 101 has helped improve my literacy narrative because I was taught to use different forms of mediums to display my work. For example, project six has allowed us to do a research on a topic and display it on a poster, and now we are creating a web text to display our work in a different form. Based on the class, I was opened minded with being vulnerable with my work to succeed in the class. I learned that as a first year at college, we all face the same problems and I should not be afraid to open up because it is all about learning experiences.
For our web-text, my partner Chantal and I, researched the reading differences in preferences between reading an e-book versus a paper book. We wanted the website to contain every thing we needed plus be easy to navigate.