calling the semester quits...

I honestly do not know where to begin.  If you asked me where I would be today, a year ago I would definitely not have said here.  All through high school I thought I was going far away for school, I didn’t want to know anyone and basically to me, college was a chance for me to start over.  Well I didn’t go far away, I came to Southern and when I started, I didn’t know one student.  My first few months at Southern were the worst experience of my life thus far but it’s amazing what one close friend and a car can do to change all of that around.

         Southern as a learning environment, taking out the fun and focusing mainly on the education is excellent.  I was so nervous to come to college and start having to teach myself and just losing all boundaries I had before in high school.  Transitioning was pretty difficult but once I got the hang of it, I realized that I flourish in environments where I am in control.  I made the rules, made the schedules for completing the work and if I didn’t want to stop to eat dinner, I didn’t have to.  To me, sometimes this was hard and I felt overwhelmed MANY times but overall, I think it was awesome to have a taste of the real world.  I’m definitely not ready to be completely in charge but I like where my responsibilities are at this point.

         Many of my classes were similarly set up to my high school classes and for this I am thankful that I went to such a challenging high school.  I struggled everyday of high school and I was always told it would pay off.  It did.  My classroom strategies that I learned in high school definitely carried over with me to college.  I know that if I don’t understand something, I need to raise my hand and ask a question because no ones going to stop and ask if the class understands.  I know that if I am struggling with a homework assignment, I should e-mail the professor right away and not wait until the last minute because there is no guarantee that they will respond.  If I wasn’t taught these skills in high school I would’ve struggled a lot more at Southern than I actually did, academically.

         Speaking of grades…. This is potentially the first time I have not gotten a C or lower as a grade since the 6^th grade.  One class is on the verge of a C but other than that, I worked extremely hard and it paid off.  My grades for this semester are amazing (to me and my family at least) and I could not be more proud of myself.  As selfish as this sounds, my grades are something I am very proud of at Southern.  I thought that the transition and new ways of learning were going to be negative impacts on my grades as a college student but thankfully I was wrong. 

         Next semester I am really hoping to just keep improving with my grades and possibly making Dean’s List.  If I could achieve that, I would be amazed with myself.  In order to do that I plan on focusing on my studies and definitely limiting the procrastination… That’s a big downfall of mine but I have realized this and hopefully next semester I can keep this to a low.  All in all, I think this semester went very well and I’m excited to keep kicking some butt next semester and also for the rest of my college career!

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the semester!!

last week of blogging!

For my final project I decided on a long blog post discussing myself as a student this semester as well as a college student in general. I’m not usually good at assessing myself as a person but I know I’m very realistic so I think this will be a good evaluation.  So far I’ve picked out a few of the guiding questions that were posted on the class blog that I’m going to use as a basis for my post.  The three main questions are:

What have you learned about yourself as a college student so far? Where are you in your learning process?

How are you doing in meeting the personal goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the semester? Are you where you had hoped you would be by this point in your college career?

Where do you want to go from here and what do you think you need to do in order to get there? Is there anything you need to change? Is there anything you can improve upon in the upcoming semesters?

I think chose these three questions because I think that they can flow very well in the answers.  Obviously I’m going to have to answer more than just these three but I picked these as the main focus for my final blog post.

I haven’t really thought on how to make it interesting but I’m probably going to have to do this through the pictures I choose because the writing itself if pretty self explanatory.