WP4: Semester Reflection

My writing journey this semester has been very on and off to say the least. There have been many stumbles in terms of getting my ideas to be concrete for me to understand, before even making them understandable to the audience. Furthermore, life has a way to influence one’s writing, and with life being as dynamic and unpredictable as it is, my writing journey has been very much the same in that regard.

But starting with WP1, I knew my ideas would be centered around who I am as a person. I am an immigrant, first generation, low-income, minority college student who is very passionate about STEM. It’s been like that all my life and I wouldn’t change it for anything else. The experiences that I have had, living the life I live, all though hard at times, are also very rewarding, insightful, and powerful for my overall development as a person. And that stuff is priceless in my eyes. However, to say that said development was easy and blissful would be a fat ass lie. And so what I wanted to accomplish from my writing was to determine a smoother development process to the same goal of achieving what I have achieved without all the mess that came with that process. So for WP1 I took the time to write about my life from childhood to young adulthood, taking the time to analyze the struggles as well as the green pastures of my life. I analyzed the different environments I was in, the different goals I set for myself, the different set of obstacles I had to face, and the different ways I approached each process to overcoming said obstacles and reaching said goals. From finishing WP1 I was able to recognize what parts and aspects of my life I wanted to focus on when trying to share my ideas to the audience and so I ran with that going into WP2.

For WP2 I had to take a step back and reflect on tangibles that could represent different parts and aspects of my life. These tangibles ranged from soccer highlights to portraits to music. And I took the time to elaborate on how each tangible represented a certain part of my progression and or certain aspect of my identity. I really enjoyed WP2 because it was fun finding different ways to share my story and through just words. I felt like an artist, a poet, and an author all at the same time, and that experience also helped me to see the parallels between each of those professions. Overall WP2 was unlike any experience I’ve had in writing core class before, and that made it very fun for sure.

Now moving on to WP3, it’s fair to say that this was the project I had the most struggle with. When drafting this project, I took a lot of time focusing on my story, my experiences, and my attributes, to try and get a deeper understanding of who I am in order to present my ideas in a clear and authentic way. This is evident in several posts I have made in which I reflect on my passion for engineering and how my life experience has influenced my path towards determining and enhancing that passion. Now the problem with all of this reflection and drafting was that by the end of my first draft, all I really created was a story of my life (laughing emoji). It was like I was volunteering at a children’s library reading a book out loud for kids sitting criss cross applesauce in a circle. And this is exactly the feedback I got from my teacher, although not in those words or in that fashion, but in a more helpful and constructive way. Consequently, when revising my WP3, my objective was to make my project more of an argumentative piece with ideas and a perspective on some aspect of our world that the audience can benefit from. To this I introduced more sources to my piece and shifted from my ted talk approach to a more regular argument essay. Now I didn’t just eliminate all the narration and life experience stuff out of the window, but I did reduce how much of that stuff was in my piece by a lot so I can leave plenty of room to make my argument, which was to throw away the banking concept practiced in current day classrooms and replace it with a problem-solving learning concept. And funny enough I was able to find a good amount of my life experience to help in the formation and strength of my argument, and I feel that by the end of the revision I had a great mixture of both narration/ life reflection as well as argument and sources, etc.

After completing a whole semester of this writing course, I will be honest, I found nothing new or intriguing about myself in terms of my identity, values, etc. I guess with me already being a very, almost obsessively, reflective person, that I knew all those things about myself, in terms of my passions, how my experience shaped who I am, and what type of future I hope to have for myself and the communities I personally value. But being able to write all of this stuff down in writing rather than just in my head and heart, was a great experience. I think I’ve learned more so how to better communicate who I am, my passions, and my values to others. I tend to neglect certain experiences of mine and in turn also neglect certain aspects of my identity, but doing this project helped me put all my experience onto paper and allow me to not only remember them but further reflect on them to help me in developing my identity. All in all, I am very thankful for the space this class offered for me to reflect upon what makes me, me. And I think my biggest takeaway from this class is the amount of work I have put into communicating my identity to others in a productive, insightful, and dare I say influential way.