When
it was time to register for classes, I had no idea on how the procedure
worked. It was so different from how I
did it in high school. Before the actual
sit down with an advisor, I talked to my mom about what I should take for my
first semester of college. She said I
should take the freshman seminar because it would benefit me in the long run
and she said it looked like a fun class to take since it was a pretty small
class. I took her up on that and when it
was time to register I signed up for the class.
When
I walked into the SALC (Student
Academic Learning
Center) area of the
building, it looked like a friendly place to be. I get to meet some new people, share some
stories with them and even get to learn something new with a group of
people. The first assignment that we had
was the first threaded discussion on the bridge. I grew to hate the bridge as the year went
on. It was a great activity to do to on
the first day to learn about the other people in class. I enjoyed learning about the other people and
what their favorite things were. The
other one I enjoyed also was when we found a picture and posted it, then
someone would have to tell you what they think of the picture, then you would
have to go back and tell them what the picture meant to you and why. That activity also gave the opportunity to
learn more about your classmates.
When
we got into choosing our research topic, it became a little scary. I honestly didn’t care what we did as long as
we picked it soon. We finally got down
to two controversial topics to do our research on: body modification and feng shui. There was a girl who would drop the class if
her topic didn’t get picked. We talked
and argued about the two topics for about two classes. You could feel the tension in the room. I really didn’t want to be in there when all
of the arguing and yelling. We voted
twice and we still couldn’t get a definite answer. Karen and Francine, our peer facilitators,
told us that we’ve better come up with a way to settle this dispute over the
topics or we would do a coin flip. When
they left the room, we all looked at each other. Hey, the coin flip idea doesn’t sound that
bad. So we did it. It all came down to the coin flip to decide
once and for all, body modification or feng shui. Body modification won and the girl still
dropped the class even though her topic was picked…how lame.
Once
we found out what our topic was, we were assigned groups to be in. I was in the body shaping group with Casey
and Erin. We all got along with each
other and we all contributed information equally. We took the time to get to know each other
and where we came from. There weren’t
any huge problems, but some of our research was questionable, and we fixed
it. Our communication worked well, we
got to where we needed to be and we got our work done on time.
From
being in this group, I learned how to work with people I really don’t know that
well and learning about them, how to communicate and arrange meetings to get
our work done on time when it’s due and learning the whole process on how to
create a web page. I’m glad I took this
class. I learned so many useful things
for my future classes such as looking on the internet library for books to do
research on and learning how to use our huge Holland library.
The
whole process with getting your work done and put into the web site did stress
me out along with my group. I was very
relieved when the presentation finally came and we got to see all of the other
groups’ projects being presented plus our own.
It was great to finally get it out of the way. No more stress about it getting done. That was the first time I ever had to dress
up for a presentation. We got an A on our project.
Overall
I thought this class was very helpful.
All of the peer facilitators were friendly and if you needed help they
were there to help no questions asked.
They made sure we understood what was asked of us. I really liked it when they would write the up-coming
information down on the white board to make sure everyone was up to date about
everything that was due. The other
activity I thought was fun was every time at the beginning of class, our peer
facilitators would think of a topic, tell a story about their experience, then
ask us and we would tell the whole class.
It was a great way to start class.
Some of the stuff people said were hilarious. I couldn’t believe some of the stuff people
actually said or did. It was very
entertaining. If I were to do it all
again, I would have not taken this class.
I really did not get that much out of it but I did make some friends and
learned a little bit about how to use the technology and information that was
there for us to utilize.
