Sorting Through It All

Before I turn my focus to the coming excitement of nursing school, I've decided to look back on the past two semesters which got me to the point at which I am now.

While the transition to the whole 'living on your own' aspect of college was easy, the transition to 'here's a paper and 2-4 tests every week' was not... at all.  In short, it kicked my butt.  I understand that to many of you that doesn't seem like very much, and I consider you lucky.  My high school left me entirely unprepared for the workload of college life.  It was incredibly easy to not even have to take homework home, you could just finish it in the morning before class.  And tests, who ever heard of studying before the morning of a test??

So that was an abrupt awakening.  And anyone who knows me, which I realize is probably none of you, knows that I agonize over what to write for a paper, it has to "feel" just right.  The flow of the sentences and the ideas has to perfectly express my thoughts.  Anything less just feels wrong, and for me just one out-of-place sentence can ruin how I feel about an entire paper.  It was commonplace for me to finish a paper (which I would also read to the class) at 4am the morning it was due and get up and go to my 745 class.

I also discovered that who reads your paper makes a difference too.  During my Academic Writing class in high school, my teacher and I didn't really appreciate the same writing styles and despite myself being a decent writer in the grammar and language departments, she dismissed most of my papers as "confusing..."  I will admit, in her defense, my organization wasn't top rate.
 But... then came college, where I finally found a professor that spoke my "language" you could say.

In this class, I made the discovery that how you read a paper in your head, with all the pauses and breaths and emphasis, drastically affects your opinion of the quality of the paper.  It could sound like a seven-year-old wrote it or it could sound like a beautiful piece of art.  Perspective is huge.  In this case, I was taking a first year class that was supposed to basically covered speaking and writing, but I had the luck of getting the best possible prof. in my opinion.  Our class still covered the main points of good speaking and writing, but he took the class so much deeper and while other sections were learning how to correctly use commas and speak at the proper speed we were analyzing how speech and language are powerful mediums, discovering that every opinion has value, and learning how to be a speaker who serves their audience instead of their own agendas.  Every day, class was so interesting and filled with profound ideas that made you think so hard.  It will honestly forever be my favorite class.  

Well this got to be far longer than I expected so I'm going to break it into two parts.  I will post part II, I Am Not An Introvert, within the next two days.  Thank you so much for taking the time to read these scrambled thoughts of mine!

Hasta Luego!