Semester Reflections

Semester 1

Looking back towards my vision of how I thought my first semester of college would go. I would say that it fit exactly how I thought it would. I envisioned myself having a pretty chill semester just getting into the hang of school work while also learning how to juggle outside activities which was pretty hard to do but I managed which was great. I think what I learned the most this semester was learning what should come first and how to discipline myself in the things that needed to be done to get to the fun stuff. Aside from schoolwork, I connected with other people around me by joining a couple of clubs around campus and in the first few weeks talking to different people. Of course, I’m not expecting to find an entire friend group by the end of the semester because it’s our first semester as freshmen. We have plenty of time to find our people. But I feel like I made some relationships with people that will last. 

On my expectations for workload, I wasn't too surprised by what they had in store. In the beginning, I was psyched out about what a long 12-page essay would look like because I hadn’t written 12-page papers before. But then when I realized it was double-spaced, it didn't seem as bad. The people around me had me thinking it was single-spaced. Plus, with the amount of content you need to have for one essay, 12-page papers are easy to pull off considering you need 15 articles for one topic. But I can say there was one class that had me a bit worried which was math. There was homework assigned to us every day along with classes bening from Monday through Friday. It became a bit excessive and overwhelming, so it gave me a run for my money but I conquered which I can say I am very proud of. 

Honestly, for the Art Scholars Colloquium, my expectations for what we have discussed in this class are everything I expected. Because it’s so many things that we can classify as art so I don't think we missed much on what the different art forms would be. For instance, dance, visual art written art, and musical art. Colloquium pretty much covered the more general art forms that we see day to day. Outside of the classroom, this isn't what I expected to be for arts. Well to more clear some of them I did but not all of them. I took the museum walks to be something we would do, but I was surprised by Cirque, Washington Library, and such. Truthfully I just wasn't expecting the amount of off-campus field trips we would take which was nice, it gave me motivation to explore outside campus. 

From the entire semester of noteworthy things to remember from Art scholars my favorite would have to be the vogue dancing that we had in the earlier weeks. Something about the guest speaker and his way of engaging the group felt great to me. He found ways we could all feel comfortable going into ballroom dance by representing the variations of ballroom there was. Even if the majority of his style was Vogue fem, he also did some Vogue masc to help the boys feel looser on dancing. Along with the dance breaks, where he had us go line by line, it had me feeling free to not care, and feel light about what I was doing. Overall, I will use my experience here in the future by representing myself freely anywhere I go with my way of expressing myself without worrying about judgment.

To finish one of the greatest challenges that I faced this semester is time management and not letting the feeling of worry set in. Knowing there was a lot of work to be done I made sure that I maintained a level head even if things weren't going according to plan. Like with grades that shot down completely I worked my way back up by doing exceptional work. When I did not understand the material I went to coach class most days so I could understand properly. These are just a few examples of how I held myself together. I believe toward the middle of the semester I had a better grip of not letting this get to me and continued with a positive mind. Reinforcing it even by putting post-it notes on my desk to ensure I won't forget what I preached the entire semester which helped me more than I thought. The challenges I faced were mental hurdles that I had to overcome so for a new experience, I did a phenomenal job.