At this time last year, I was in New Jersey trying to decide between 16 other schools, probably one of the most thought out decisions I have ever made in my life. I asked for advice from my coaches, elders, friends even school janitors but at the end of the day it is about finding a place that makes you feel welcomed and makes you feel like you’re at home. University of New England met all of my criteria plus more. After I committed to play football here most of my expectations for college were spaced out on the order of things that were being thrown at me, I chose to just focus on the things that were thrown at me and attack them in that order. I did this, so I do not stress myself out over one aspect of college when there is plenty of other things that I could stress about.

My first group expectations and worries, was all about football, the offseason workout, my performance during camp, would I even make it through camp? My mind was completely revolving around football which isn’t a bad thing because I ended up starting as a freshman and making an impact on the team. From an academic stand point I knew it was going to be hard, but this is a different kind of hard, I definitely thought we would be reading way more than we did this year. On the other hand, we did a lot more writing than I thought we would, it is kind of like I was right, but I wasn’t the roles just switched.

Writing is my strong suit, so in high school writing was not hard at all for me, mainly because we barley wrote and when we did it was a one-page paper, I would just follow the five P’s aspect with those essays. I don’t think I was told to forget anything about reading but I was told I really didn’t have to read a whole passage to find my answers or I didn’t have to read a whole essay to be able to find a quote. I was taught how to annotate a passage by just skimming through the passage or essay and find what I need. Come to find out in college I am told to forget everything I learned in high school because I am going to be learning the exact opposite. There goes four years of work down the drain. Great.

Forgetting wasn’t the hard part though, it was learning the opposite because I found myself doing the same things I was taught to do in high school multiple times before I really forgot everything. Looking at it from the perspective of a first-year student who is getting ready to wrap up his first semester as a college student, forgetting what I was taught in high school helped me in many ways. One way is it helped open up the amount of ways I could write a simple essay or lab report. It’s kind of like they opened up a new form of trust in the student telling them that they trust them to write an essay or label report with really no format to follow step by step.

Habits of the creative mind was a big help in trying to forget and learn a bunch of new writing styles and a bunch of new ways to format my writing. After being let off the leash from all the high school “rules” Habits was like my trainer in helping me not get lost in all of the freedom I was given in writing. There are 7 Habits of the Creative minds according to the book, some of these habits I can say I successfully learned and put to affect. I can say that I used the creativity, curiosity, persistence and openness to new ideas aspects in some of my writing. I definitely used the curiosity aspect in my Unabomber essay, I know this because I remember getting lost in my research and pulling away from the Unabomber and then glancing up at how many tabs I had open and I am more than sure there was 20 slides open of a whole bunch of Unabomber information. I feel as if every student in this class this semester has completed the openness to new ideas, because of the simple fact that we had to forget everything from high school and be open to developing new skills and ways of writing. I still have not gotten to the attentiveness, flexibility and reflectiveness, these three habits are hard for me to try and understand.

Pollan vs Singer was my welcome to college calling, I call it this because I’ve written plenty of essays over my high school career, but this essay wasn’t just slapping a bunch of words on a word document following a rubric. There was a lot of having to relate yourself to text, take quotes from the passage, and dissecting the passage to find the answers I needed to develop a strong essay. Developing a question essay is very hard and complicated, and I don’t really know why it is so hard but the Pollan vs Singer essay was most definitely my welcome to college call. Maybe it was just the process overall of trying to dissect a paper while trying to make a big question that summarizes the whole passage and then finding a bunch of smaller questions the trickle down the rest of the paper. In my eyes I felt like it was every essay I’ve ever learned how to write in the aspect of just one big paper.

My largest areas of growth in all three processes of this class, have to be learning how to take constructive criticism, coming into college I was being hardheaded even with football related criticism, then when academics came around I was still doing the same thing. I would make it seem like I really listening to what you have to say to me and then I would just go try and fix everything myself. Which later down the road, I realize that, that is not the way to make it through college. After I failed my first exams, I started to take this criticism little by little and I eventually got a little better with my hard headedness and started to make slight increases in my attitude and my test scores.

I didn’t just have to learn how to be able to take constructive criticism, but I had to learn how to dissect and annotate a passage, which was something very new to me. I have never done anything related to that topic ever in my career as a student. It isn’t hard when you are told to just annotate what you think is important but when you are told to find questions and supporting questions I found that very hard. I also had to forget the way I constructed my paragraphs in high school and develop a new way to construct my essays and be creative with the way I organize and construct my essays. My growth throughout this semester was consistently going in a good direction, especially with the help of my writing lab, that really helped me learn how to take constructive criticism and learned how to annotate and use that information to my ability in creating a good essay.

Over this semester I made a lot of mistakes, but I feel as it that is something that is normal for someone like me in the position I am personally in, along with every other first year student. I don’t like thinking of mistakes as something that stops me from learning or stop me from trying to adjust to this college lifestyle. I feel as if mistakes are something that should be considered as learning experiences and something that should be used as something positive instead as labeled as something negative. One of my biggest mistakes was my priorities were messed up and not in the correct order. I was focused on football more than academics at one point, this wasn’t my biggest mistake, but it led to much more. In the beginning of the semester I was on top of all my work in all of my classes, everything went downhill when I failed my first biology exam and then immediately after that I failed a psychology exam, I think I got real discouraged after that, in which made me not do well on the rest of my exams. I also need to learn how to not be afraid of embracing my failures and my flaws. I need to learn how to be okay with asking for help and being wrong.

From a reading and writing standpoint I don’t think that I made a huge mistake, one reason for this is because this class fits me perfectly. I am a good writer, and a decent reader when I want to be. I would most definitely say that I need to be more cognizant of my reading habits and I also need to just read more in general because reading is just good for the mind overall and good to develop knowledge. I can also say I need to improve on my ability on being able to pull quotes and move them around from text to text. Quotations is another thing I need to try and improve on, quotations as in me quoting myself or quoting someone in the third person.

Being an engaged reader and someone who is trusted to critique a partner’s work is overall something I need a major improvement on. Some people and professors may say the improvement doesn’t have to be major, but if I were to judge myself on the abilities I have related to this topic I feel as if I should improve majorly. Assessing myself is another aspect of work that can improve, but I feel like I am hard on myself normally, so I don’t think that will be a hard task. My number one thing that could be improved majorly is the simple fact that I am not the type of person to accept constructive feedback and criticism, I will listen to everything that could possibly be criticized but as soon as the conversation is over I will forget about it and start to try and fix everything myself. Learning from my mistakes is not hard for me because like I said I am hard on myself, so I usually try not to even come close to making that mistake again. Lastly, I feel like I should work on my studying habits and the way I practice the things I’ve learned. Overall this course made me realize a lot about myself and my abilities. From failing exams to learning how to write a 600-word paper in 30 minutes. This course was a wakeup call definitely.