Hello! Welcome to my Homepage which is also my Self Assessment Essay 🙂

This is my self assessment essay and starting off, I will say I struggled a lot. Like, a lot. This class was not easy on me and I feel like I couldn’t really adapt to the lessons well. That being said, I did learn a few things. Not sure if that’s bad or good but It certainly gave me an interesting perspective on the subject of science and research. Especially in how my attitude towards work really affected my performance as a whole.

The first big thing we did for class was our rhetorical analysis on something we wanted to talk about or do research on. This one is definitely my worst one out of all works. I did not have any understand of this class at the time. I still feel like I don’t have much of an understanding of this class but I got such a low grade it was kinda sad. I really did not understand anything and I was very distracted at this time. For example, “Regardless of who is reading it, he starts it off with an easy introduction to evolution and makes a general statement about the overall process of evolution and why it happens,” I understand why I got the grade I got. It was the wrong type of source that went against the guidelines and my essay went around in circles. I understood nothing and honestly I’m not surprised. It was hard for me to pick up the information properly. I slacked off the most here.

The second project we did was our Literature Review, where we had to pick a subject to research on certain topics we chose to focus on. This would lead up to our group having to do the public campaign website project. My group focused on the effects/impacts of climate change. For this part, we didn’t communicate much with each other and were pretty solitary in the first half of this project. My literature review was about the amount of emissions the food industry gives off. I liked this project because it gave me a decent direction to go off of. I got slightly better and I got a higher grade than I did last time. But of course, there was much to be desired in this one too. One of my weaknesses for this class is not listening to instructions fully and misinterpreting them. I think like 2/3s of my sources were also not really what was supposed to be used but it somewhat worked in the long run? If only I knew how to properly compare things instead of summing up things without proper analysis. Another thing I think I struggle the most with, now that I’m looking back on it is time management. I usually don’t plan in advance or keep track of time especially this year. I had more time with this so it had a better grade but I really just didn’t grow much from it. I did learn some interesting facts from it though. “Overall, while these sources expand on different aspects of the food industry, they all make decent assumptions and gives us information that can help us try to prevent an increase in food production in the future.” This was a decent line but since I didn’t plan things beforehand, it was rushed.

Another part of me not having enough time is probably due to the pandemic! Or at least that’s how I perceived it through my ongoing bad mood and anxiety. This pandemic did put a huge wrench in everyone’s plans for the most part. I don’t think past me would’ve expected a pandemic to happen right as my graduating class was supposed to be graduating in 2020, how disappointing. The disconnect in this school year was very damaging. I didn’t feel like I could go to anyone for help and for this class, no one made a group chat. I felt the most disconnected with this class. Although small, I didn’t feel much attachment or fondness, as I felt with my bigger classes. I also frequently forgot to attend both of my classes on this day. For some reason, it really messed me up. It was easy for me to tire out.

I think the most I learned from a class unit/assignment was actually the project with the website. Moreso involving how I wanted to convey my experience and knowledge to an audience. I’ve always had a hard time doing these types of assignments but I feel like it really strengthened my presentation skills. Instead of doing a live presentation, we all thought it would be more convenient to do the prerecording. This was actually something I enjoyed surprisingly. We all had contributed to a script for each of the parts we did and I edited something together while also realizing I had to change a few things in our site, which I am glad we actually managed to do. I had to edit it a lot of times in order for the script we made to actually smoothly transition between certain parts. I was fairly new to this but I definitely felt the most growth here. I also realized how important it was to have an outline and discuss these things with my peers in order for things to go more smoothly.

Although I speak a lot of positives about the project, we were all very stressed college students who didn’t have much time to cooperate and come up with more ideas, so we didn’t really like parts of this project. I’m glad I did it but only at the halfway point of the public awareness project is when I started to actually think about the project in a more positive way. And if you’ve read our website, you could see that we put in something mentioning solarpunk. I found that word online by accident and honestly I really needed something with hope. Because I couldn’t fuel myself with persuasive words in a place that’s continued to create victims due to inaction and late policies that should’ve been installed a long time ago. Solarpunk was a nice thing I think everyone needed to look at and it’s also my fuel for continuing with this project.

In conclusion, I learned how to be more cooperative. My writing skills didn’t improve much but I tried my best for the literature review and rhetorical analysis. Although this class did have its own structure, I felt like I was on rocky grounds. I was tired for a long time. I’m doing better now but that was only by coincidence. It probably would’ve been very easy for me to spiral into something worse at this point, I’m lucky man.