Our First Week of classes has finally begun, and I can’t express how grateful and relieved I am to have finally reached this moment. Making it to Carolina has been a culmination of my life’s work up to this point, and I am proud of where it has taken me. UNC is more than a stepping stone though, and I am looking forward to this life-stage that so many describe as life-altering and impactful. My first week was a bit uneventful because of the current pandemic, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn.
Now, time to focus on English. I take English Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:00-4:15 pm. It’s my last class for the day, so I’m usually more relaxed by that time and in more of an academic mindset. On our first day of English class, I didn’t learn anything too earth-shattering. To be fair, the first days are usually spent reading syllabi and introducing classmates. My breakout group does seem nice though. We were told to give ourselves a name and we settled on “Lucky Charms.” I’m not sure why that name, but one of the goofier, outgoing people in our group suggested it, and we all just kind of went along with it. I kind of like it. It’s better than some of the other names other groups came up with. (Shade intended).
What I did learn on my first day English was a bit about what this course is. The title “ English 105: Writing at the Research University” raises more questions than it answers. I remember not knowing what to expect from this course when I read that on my class schedule. I found out this course is going to be all about writing from multiple research perspectives. An example of writing from a research perspective is students gathering information about the historical significance of a certain site and writing a concise essay about it.
Finding out a bit more about the course excited me because I really like science, and I can see the benefit of taking an English course aimed at teaching me how to write for research. To wrap up the first day, the first day was also the day I found out I was going to be the first person to write this assignment, a blog post about the work I’ve done in this class. I did feel a pang of anxiety when I heard that, since I’m not very confident in my writing abilities overall, and I don’t know how to write this. I hope I’m not doing too bad of a job so far.
My next English on Thursday was a bit more eventful than the Tuesday class. Now that we had knocked out the necessary setup for a course, we could dive in a bit more into the material. The night before we read about some research opportunities, what will be expected of us in this course, and how to essentially write for the assignments in this course. We did some In-class Activities to test if we understood what we had read the day before and that’s about all. It was pretty helpful and reaffirmed that I was understanding the readings up to that point. I like a lot of the new language we’re learning like genre, audience, and discourse community. I feel a bit pompous when I say them out loud, but they’re interesting words overall.
And that all but concludes my first week of English 105: Writing at the Research University. It might have sounded a bit dull, but it’s only the first week and I’ve already learned more in this class than any other. I am more than excited to learn even more and dive into this course. So begins my first year!
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