Final Assessment of Semester

My name is Chance Marie Sessions, and I am a college student at TAMUCC; I was born in California but live in Rockport, Texas. When hurricane Harvey hit my home went down with it, but we are rebuilding and getting stronger in that matter. College, rebuilding, and having a full time job is a big adjustment to just working full time. My family is slowly starting to rebuild and the house is coming back together in this life changing experience

Why am I working a full time job and going to school full time as well? I live on my own now and have to pay bills including: car, rent, groceries, and various school supplies. With me having to take TSI classes I also have my 18 hours of school weighing on me. Being able to do all these challenging tasks and their demands has not sunk in yet for me to completely process what has happened. The new techniques I have learned are how to elaborate more with my writing, as well as that working with groups is a great tool for feedback. Having met these challenges, I have learned that I have lots of determination when it comes to school. This quality will not only benefit me during my college years but also for my career.

Having made a number of academic changes for my writing, I am getting to better understand the concept of how to make my writing more fluent. When I first walked into my classes I was intimidated by the large class size and all the people that sat before me. In high school, I didn't quite understand how important collaboration is but I learned that in college. For example, when somebody asks How do you use MLA in your essay?, I benefit from the explanation because I did not quite understand that concept in high school. I have also gained the ability to learn new things I find interesting, such as when we discuss our writing process. For example, when we come into class everyday and start to write our "writing into the day", in the beginning that helps me get my mind moving in the right direction for the rest of the class. Though writing is a big part of our world, its a weird topic because it is not natural; it is learned. I learned this idea in the book Naming What We Know. This passage is the one that really stood out for me because I never looked at writing in that way. When I began the process of writing my first essay, I learned how much I needed to learn when it came to this discipline. There are so many different ways people explained to me that I had never thought of how helpful collaboration could be. By using techniques like working as a group, I believe everyone can benefit from feedback such as my talking to the professor to completely understand the instructions for the assignment. These strategies are so fundamental that I can use them throughout college to further my education.

As I am writer transitioning to a new academic standard, having dyslexia proves another challenge for me as a freshmen in college. This is one reason why I have problems with my choppy sentences and sometimes my wording does not make sense. Still, I discovered that by having a peer read my writing and give me notes I can see different points about my work that I first missed. Dealing with dyslexia was only a mild setback because I already have strategies...…for the first one because I did not know what it would consist of. But, when the second one came around I did not put as much effort into it as I should have. In the future, I will dedicate more time to the way I studied before.

Starting college for my first year as well as having to build my home from the ground up has been one of the most difficult processes I have done. Straining my resources beyond their limits, I came to stopping point to where I had to cease working on my house and focus on school. But, along with these challenges, came persistence and openness to anything that may come my way. Having to think about what these classes have really done for me is another challenge in itself. Looking back into the beginning of the semester, I believed it was going to be a piece of cakebut things never end that way. The phrase courage, conviction, and composition, did not make any sense to me at the time but moving forward in the year, it all made sense. You have to really work hard for your grades; they don't come naturally like in high school. Taking responsibility for the grades I received, I soon realized I needed to step up my work and study hard and longer. I soon started to realize that when I put more work into it, the outcome is a lot sweeter.

Being a part of learning community E is an intimidating thing. Working with my group 240, I found a lot of great people with lots of different personalities which creates diversity in the group. When having to write the bibliography, I had an open mind but was frightened at the fact of I never had done a bibliography before.…