As a writer, I doubt myself often. I always seem to struggle getting words onto paper and frequently delete my progress due to my indecisiveness. It was a goal of mine to come out of this course as a better writer. I no longer wanted to write just to reach a word count, but to completely display my message. 6,000 words seemed impossible when I read the syllabus on the first day of class. It turned out to be pretty simple. The format of the class was perfect for students the project was broken down into 3 parts.

     Throughout the course, I learned a lot of things that can be used through the rest of college. Little things such as formatting were never introduced to me throughout High School. If I hadn't taken this course over this summer, I would've been incorrectly formatting papers on a college level. Mat showing us the Purdue Owl website is also something I will using as a resource over the next four years. In my actual paper, Mat gave me a great tip saying "show, don't tell." This advice is something I held on to because my papers will become much more descriptive if I utilize the technique.

     Another unique feature of this class was the presentations. Coming into college, I assumed I'd blend in with a group of 250 people during a lecture. Instead this class had about 25 people where each person had their own voice. Although I used to fear speaking in front of people, analyzing a video in front of the class and summarizing "The Habitat" mentor text turned out to be a good experience. Being in a small class was definitely one of the better parts of the course.

     Writing the personal narrative was surprisingly enjoyable as I did an in-depth analysis of a community I was a part of. I wrote about my experience at a Pittsburgh Steelers playoff game this past January, with the 68,000 fans as my community. Describing every little thing that happened that day from the minute I woke up to the time the game concluded was great. At our conference, Mat didn't critique much but told me to scrap the "essay styled" conclusion paragraph. Besides a little confusion about whether P1 and P2 had to relate, writing the Personal Narrative was a good experience.

     Writing the research paper came out of nowhere. I was reading the syllabus and realized that it was completely due in less than two weeks. I didn't have any ideas on how to start the paper off. After thinking it out, I organized my previous community and personal profile to start the paper off and then jumped into the text analysis. Hitting the 3,000 turned out to be relatively easy. When I received my grade for P2 I wasn't disappointed, but not satisfied. Mat commented on how I missed the mark with "analyzing the interactions within the community" such as comments below YouTube posts. However, Mat noted that the analysis of the actual videos was what covered some of that missed ground. On top of that, Mat emailed me notes of other small things which I found extremely helpful. Being able to see exactly what I did wrong was very helpful. One mistake that I will never make again is putting the annotated bibliography out of alphabetical order. I was completely unaware of this but Mat pointing it out in the comments will enable me to never make that mistake again.

     Part 3 was great as we had to apply our projects to the FSU community and beyond (with social media). I enjoyed this part of the project because I felt that it gave me real life experiences. Creating an elevator pitch and presenting it to the class is something that I'm going to have to do again one day, so being introduced to the concept early on helps. At first I was hesitant to the idea that I'd have to post flyers around campus and create a social media account for this class. It turned out to be really easy and enjoyable because we were working with something that we want to be a part of in the future.

     Six weeks ago I wouldn't have ever imagined that I'd be able to write over six thousand words. As the course progressed, I learned a lot of things that I can carry on to my future college classes. I now feel comfortable with writing large papers as I've received the essentials to earn a passing grade. Overall, this course was very enjoyable and informative. Being able to write abut communities that we aspire to join allowed each of us to creatively write while also researching a topic that already intrigued us.

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