Freshman Seminar

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.