Dear Malcolm,

A lot of the day bookwork seemed pretty useless to me. I’m not the type of journal and I

felt like I didn’t get as much as I expected from the daybook process. For example, no matter

how many reflections I wrote in my daybook I rarely ever learned from it. When I was writing

about my comments on the Topic Proposal I said, “I procrastinated hard on this assignment.”

Then for the next assignment, I proceeded to do the same to a lesser degree. I did start earlier

than the night before; however, more than half of it was the night before it was due. I just never

saw any results from doing the daybook. Sure it was nice to reflect and get my thoughts and

feelings down on paper, but at most times it felt tedious.

I liked how lit lounges were formatted toward the end of the year. At the beginning of the

year, the responses were closed until you commented. I didn't like this because I like to comment

on posts before writing my own. But when it was opened from the beginning it felt more like an

actual discussion. Responding to other people was also pretty interesting. Making it mandatory

to read and respond to other people’s responses forced us to listen to other opinions; however, I

feel like the discussion was so forced in some cases. It was like I was doing a seminar in high

school where people are required to talk even if their ideas aren’t fully formed. In my opinion,

this activity was a bit too tedious. Near the end, I was just doing the assignment just to do the

assignment, not to learn something. For example, near the end of the semester I realized that on

my last couple of lit lounges my responses were simply just summarization with very little

analysis, and when I was replying to other students I was using simple summarization and

defaulted to using the general “I agree …” or “I disagree …” phrases and didn’t add much to the

discussion overall.
 Free writes were extremely helpful. The free writes started my mornings with a good

reflection. They acted as a good brain warm-up and let me put my thoughts of the night before

onto paper. While I did miss some of them due to being late I made up by doing them in my own

time. My favorite free write was one of the first few free writes that we did. The prompt was

“I’m in college because …” because it allowed me to look ahead in and remind myself of my

goals and the reasons why I decided to go to college and this college in particular.

Peer review was helpful to some degree; however, when we did it in groups I felt like

only one person was truly commenting. The other person would kind of just agree with the other

and not make any new or original comments. For example, on the annotated bibliography one of

my group members said, “There is no such thing as a perfect source,” and that I should include

points about why the source isn’t so good. My other group member said, “I agree with [insert

group member name]. You should add something that explains what the source is lacking.” This

also occurred in the peer review for the first drafts.

Overall the readings were quite helpful and thought-provoking, much like the ones about

social media and its effects on people. “Joyas Voladoras” was among my favorite. It made me

think about time and how precious each heartbeat was. I found it tragic that no matter how hard

someone would try to connect to others no one would ever truly understand them fully. Listening

to sad music highlighted this point the first time I read through this passage. In my LBST 1103

Music studies class, we were learning about the connection between music and emotion, and in

this situation, I experienced this first hand, which I thought was pretty cool. Other readings, such

as the writer's moves ones, helped me with transitions which were one of my weaknesses as a

writer.
 In most cases, I’m not the biggest fan of group work. Most of the work tends to be put

onto one person while the other group members slack off. This year when we did group work it

was similar to this; however, it felt fairer because more people tended to do their parts. I didn’t

feel like group work was truly a collaboration between multiple people. It felt more like

individual work that was pasted together to meet requirements. In the example annotated

bibliography assignment my group split up the work, which made it easy to coordinate; however,

it wasn’t group work at all.

I felt like the annotated bibliography was my most important work. This was because it

helped me learn about the difference between a good source and a bad source. Along with this, it

was the assignment that I put the most work into. This was one of the few times I didn’t

procrastinate on an assignment. Analyzing the sources that I had found made me realize that you

should always look for the best source, not just the first source that you find. This helped me

with my writing because it gave me better sources to base my body paragraphs on. But the

largest gain was from what I learned as a student. Not only did I get to learn about how to write

an annotated bibliography, but this assignment also affected the way I researched all my other

classes. Plus, it was the first time that I got out of my bad habit of procrastination.

One of my largest weak points includes grammar (will not be discussed) and my

tendency to procrastinate on almost every assignment. This is why the annotated bibliography

assignment was so important to me. However, for every other assignment, I procrastinated and

waited until the last day to do my work. It did get better as the semester went by, but when I got

sick it set me so far back that I was forced to procrastinate and I wasn’t able to recover from

there. My problem with procrastination is that I don’t prioritize the right things. I always want to

go to social events when I should be studying or doing homework, and when I do decide to do
my homework I get off task easily. In the future, I need to set a schedule for myself and manage

my time better. One of the things I improved on as a writer was my transitions. At the beginning

of the year, I felt that my writing was choppy; however, doing the assignments and readings for

class helped me with this aspect of my writing.

My largest challenge occurred at the beginning of the year when we were had to come up

with questions for the extended inquiry project (EIP). I couldn’t find a question that piqued my

interest. In the beginning I created questions about fashion because it was one of my big

interests; however, when we were in groups evaluating questions, my group pointed out that my

questions would be hard to research due to the creative nature of fashion. After that, I was lost. I

couldn’t find a topic that interested me and was semi-easy to research. It wasn’t until a later

week did I find a topic of interest. In ITSC 1600 there was a panel with Bank of America

workers who talked about modern problems in the cybersecurity field. It was there that I

stumbled upon cloud computing. From this experience, I learned that sometimes waiting and

being patient will benefit over constantly stressing over a problem. Along with this, I learned that

the best mindset to solve a problem is an open one.

The topic proposal was a pretty hard assignment because I didn’t get an idea for

researching until the week that the assignment was due. Not only this but procrastinating till the

due date made researching and writing about the topic difficult. It wasn’t my best writing. If I

could change my actions I would find a topic earlier and start my research earlier. The two things

that made this assignment easier was the fact that we didn’t have to cite any sources and that it

had an easy structure to follow.

The annotated bibliography was my favorite assignment. This was because finding good

sources was easy for my topic. Along with this, summarizing sources, looking up information
about authors, and analyzing the source was fairly easy. I got the most helpful feedback on this

assignment, even though it was only from one person. The most challenging part of the

assignment was citing the sources correctly. Sometimes I couldn’t find information easily, which

was irritating. Plus sometimes the format of the citation was confusing. When I first discovered

that we had to write an annotated bibliography I thought that it would be the hardest assignment;

however, the structure of the annotations was spelled out for us, which made it easy to do. I wish

I spent more time proofreading so that I could’ve caught simple mistakes.

The EIP Draft was the hardest assignment in my opinion. Being sick didn’t help the fact

that it was generally a hard assignment. Writing papers is my least favorite thing to do and at that

time I also had another paper to write for LBST 1103. So along with two five-page essays, I had

to catch up with all the classwork that I missed in all my other classes. I was even given an

extension on the assignment to the up incoming Sunday. I did finish writing by Sunday;

however, somehow I forgot to turn it in. I was so angry at myself for this. How could I forget to

turn in an assignment I finished? I always felt like I didn’t have enough to write about and didn’t

know where to build my paper. I wish I proofread this assignment a lot more than I did because I

would’ve been able to catch most of the grammatical mistakes, like comma splices and

incomplete sentences.

The ePortfolio allowed my artistic and more creative side flow. Getting started was the

hardest part of the assignment. This is because I didn’t know where to start and what template

on Weebly I should use. However, once I got started on the ePortfolio it wasn’t too hard. The

speed that Weebly ran at was suprizing. I expected it to be slow, but not as slow as it was running

when I was creating my ePortfolio. Another challenging part of the assignment was the revision
for the EIP Draft because of it too a lot of time. I was surprised about how helpful the margin

outline was in the revision process. I didn’t enjoy the revision process at all.

After going through this class, I realized that when it comes to grammar and studying

habits I have a long way to go. I want to stop procrastinating, but that’s a problem I can’t fix in

one day. Along with this, this class inspired me to do more research on the topic of cloud

computing.

Sincerely,

Christopher Fong