A Challenged Experience

To me, the university isn’t just about passing courses. Rather, it is a whole program which teaches me the life. When I finished my high school, I was afraid to go to a university because of the second language. Especially the Global University which many people worried me from going to it telling me that it’s very hard to pass the courses there since it just depends on English. But still, I challenged myself and went there and I did Eng104 and Eng105 and passed them. But when I reach to Eng201, several students frightened me from Mrs. Samira and from the course itself. Thus, I was training a lot in the summer writing my own blog. Therefore, I enrolled into it but without full of excitement. But indeed, I admit that I really get improved.

In fact, there were many enjoyable tasks in this course. One of them was the pair work. Although I did not so much enjoy the working with my fellow, but still I was enjoying the work itself. At the beginning, I wasn’t able to understand what the task was but finally the teacher directed me to the point. I have showed my work also to several friends just to take their opinions about it and that’s what supported me a little. It was required to search for two pictures and comment on them, and I like this kind of tasks which is commentary. As I felt that it is a kind of additional work to us to be enjoyed.

I did not like to write essays just like many other students. But in Eng201, I started trying to change my type of writing in order to enjoy it. The response essay was my favorite part because it was about criticism on the author’s article “Television Addiction”. And in my real life, I comment a lot for example on the T.V shows, poetry I read, etc. Therefore, it was already a part of my personality. Also, when I wrote an illustration essay I felt it easy to write especially the topic which I chose “University Students Life”. I liked to write about it because it reminded me when I was at school and how I’m changing, how I was thinking and how I become.

Finally, my hardest part was the term paper. After a long time of searches, summarizing, paraphrasing and organizing my data, I did not care about my grade. I was caring about learning. Did I do correct the instructions? Did I forget anything? Then, I understood that whatever the grade I’ll take, it was important to learn it. I felt that it needed more time to be better learned. And if one has enough time to practice more than one term paper, it will be better. Because it is not about how to write my own ideas, it is about how to summarize, paraphrase and organize others’ ideas. Additionally, the topic itself can help in managing the paper. And I didn’t find enough information about my topic “Working Mothers and Stay-at-Home Mothers”.

In conclusion, many things helped me to improve in this course. The basic thing was the second draft which guided me to get rid of my weakness points. It showed me my mistakes and it gave me a second chance to fix them by myself. It improved my vocabulary skills and ideas organization. The second thing which helped me is watching several videos online that related to the material. In the end, although I am not satisfied my grades, but I really get improved in other courses. Because I realized that many other courses are related to this one since they require assignments, term papers and mini-projects. Accordingly, I saw that Eng201 itself improved my grades very well in other courses.