welcome one and all
as always, I hope you are as well as can be, and that you’re taking care of yourself :)
It’s been an interesting week, as my first semester of college is coming to an end. There is only one more week of instruction, and the last couple days are left for finals. I can not express how excited I am for the semester to be done. I’ve done a lot, including: meeting new people on LC campus, exploring the LC campus, safely building relationships with the people in my dorm hall (b/c covid), exploring downtown Portland, exploring the BON food, and taking interesting classes. So because the semester is ending, what are finals like during covid? Well for me I have multiple projects and essays to complete that serve as my “finals”, on top of other assigned classwork for class. For others like my roommate, she has multiple essays and projects to complete and prepare for actual exams. (also I miss my roommate 💛)
I’ve previously mentioned I’m taking 4 courses this semester: Intro to International Relations (IR), Intro to Cultural Anthropology, First Year Seminar and Jazz Appreciation. I can not tell you how much I loved and enjoyed my anthropology class, and how much I’ve learned from my other three classes. Before my first year seminar class, I never knew how to code in general let alone using python (this is the program used in the course), I knew close to nothing about international relations and how countries work together, and the disputes and histories they embody that are still present today. I am grateful for my professors as they actively do their very best to teach over zoom, they're also always reaching out to students with the best intentions of helping. In all honesty, my passion in majoring in International Relations is disappearing, and a better passion in the study of anthropology has been discovered. For me I realized as much as I enjoy learning about the politics and relations of countries, I’m not a big fan of it on a academic platform. Taking this course has challenged me in ways I am very grateful for, but I think IR works better for me as an outside learning process. The first couple weeks of my anthropology class, I realized how in love I was with the teachings, lessons, discussions, and how thought provoking it was. The discussions we were having about the complexities of society we were looking at, I found to be so fascinating. I see anthropology as the study of humans, their characteristics, how and why people choose to do certain things, say certain things, how they are influenced by things like social media, politics, religion, and communities. There is so much more to anthropology that I look to learning about. So I am heavily leaning to be a Sociology and Anthropology (SOAN) major :)
As I prepare for the end of the semester, we have course evaluations that allow students to reflect on how well their classes were taught or how classes can improve. This time has motivated me to reflect on my own progression of actually being in college, being a college student during these times. I came to acknowledge that I hadn’t realized I had the capacity not only to hold this amount of information, but to be able to understand, re-call it, and be able to apply it to my everyday actions and thoughts as a human being. I can also say confidently, I am not the only one. Being a person who came from a gap year and jumped into an rigorously academic environment, I didn’t have all the information on how to perform, who I am, or why I’m here. But I can say that being surrounded by other human beings that are now some close friends brings space for understanding and support. And that might be the thing I am most grateful for since beginning my college career, and of course the opportunity to attend college and receive a “higher education”.
