Self Assessment

My name is Kayla A. Griffith and I am 18 years old. Last year I graduated high school and moved on to a new, scary, and exciting chapter in my life, college. I received a full scholarship and was accepted to the college that I now go to which is, The City College of New York. At the beginning of the semester I was having difficulties to settle down into college. I believe the reason for this was of the big transition from moving from high school to college. I wasn’t the only one thankfully, friends from high school was also struggling to settle down too. Later on I found out that some of my friends dropped out because they just couldn’t handle the stress and the amount of work that had to be completed in college. However, this did not break my confidence in me continuing to go to college and graduate on time. Some personality traits that make me who I am are, being very logical, practical, a perfectionist, diligent, reliable, detail oriented, persistent, courageous, ambitious, humorous, outspoken, and many more. These traits has appeared in my writing style when I have to give my opinion/analyzing any reading passages or when I have to write about my life.

The skills I already had that I brought to English class were organizational and analytical skills. This helped me a lot when I had to write a paper, I organized a schedule as to where I wrote down the amount of hours in my planner that I will be doing work for and for the amount of days I will be doing the assignment to finish it. Also when Professor Jourdain assigned homework like making a discussion post answering questions based on a reading I knew how to analyze the reading. Some skills I built in class were my interviewing skills and communicating with my classmates. This all relates to specific course outcomes because, based off of the syllabus over the course of the semester we had to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond, formulate and articulate a stance through and in my writing, practice using various library resources, online database, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to my writing projects, strengthen my source use practices (like evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources.)

Reflecting on the work I’ve been doing, I have grown, learned, and challenged myself in writing by all the work that was assigned to me as classwork and homework. The top three major assignments that mirrored this were the Peer Review Assignment, Field Observation Assignment, and the Research Proposal. With the first assignment, the Peer Interview I had to do an interview with a classmate then choose a central story that I had to focus on. In a way this made me be a better analyzer and I was able to learn new things about my classmate. It made me realize that I have a few things in common with that person. I remember when it was the first day of getting to know the person, I prepared many questions the night before asking about different things she was interested in. I began taking a lot of notes on what she said not leaving out one detail because everything was important and the question she was answering could be the potential story I focused on for the peer interview assignment. At the end I was so overwhelmed with the amount of information I had taken that it was very difficult for me to choose what my central story would be. The second major assignment was the field observation assignment. In this assignment I had to choose to study something for a period of time to see if anything changed and what new things I noticed everyday, alongside jotting down my thoughts while studying the person, place, or thing. The outcome of this assignment made me improve my detailed oriented skills. Alongside, forcing me to dedicate my time to write about one thing. Since I wrote about all my animals it made me more aware of what they do on a daily basis, the time they go outside including how long they play outside for, if they act differently around each other, and the eating schedule they have. The final assignment was the research proposal project. I had to choose a topic I was interested in and go in depth about it. This assignment in particular was challenging however, I learned many things from it and me as a person. One particular challenge I had was creating the literature review. Even though my professor provided me with guidelines on it I still wasn’t sure on where to start. I then started to overthink the whole assignment causing me to procrastinate. I had to find a solution fast on how I was going to start and organize this. Thankfully, I came up with a simple solution which was writing down step by step the actions I was going to take to find the first scholarly source then the second scholarly source and the third. I believe the part I most struggled with came out to be the strongest part of the overall paper. This made me learn that if I’m struggling with a particular part in a paper to not overthink it but start writing down the steps, this will help me thoroughly organize my thoughts and complete the assignment in a timely manner instead of procrastinating. Overall, the assignments given in English 21002 has helped me grow academically as a a college student. These are qualities that I can bring with me to other classes and in the outside world.