Synthesis Essay
As my senior year has been drawing to a close (two more days left!), I have found myself reflecting on my overall high school experience. While I would have expected myself to think most about the social aspects such as the football games, cheer competitions, and maybe even all of the school dances I’ve attended. I find myself thinking most about my experience in senior inquiry. Before Senior Inquiry, my level of work ethic, organization skills, and confidence in myself as a student was virtually non-existent. I was always very doubtful of myself as a student and didn’t see or believe that I had the ability to grow from where I was as a somewhat average student to what would be considered a talented or great student. Over the past year, senior inquiry has challenged me not only on an educational level, but on a personal level as well. As this year is coming to a close, I have found myself being able to do all the things I thought I would never be able to do as a student. I find myself more and more having the ability to manage my time correctly, communicate my ideas, and to effectively argue all perspectives in a scenario. Through SINQ, I have been able to expand my quantity and quality of knowledge far beyond my original beliefs because of how lucky I’ve been to be provided with such caring and supportive teachers and a personal community as well.
To begin from the start, while reading Persepolis about a week before school started up again, I could already tell that my original level of work ethic was not going to cut it for this class. I had already underestimated by that time the amount of time both reading the book and doing the assignment would take. I learned that at the rate of time in which I read from page to page, I have less time compared to most of my peers to slack off or procrastinate on reading. Learning to correctly manage my time based off my reading pace and essentially how long assignments typically took me was an essential skill that I learned from this class. Other assignments such as both the winter and spring research papers were also huge contributors towards my mastering of time management. With the winter research paper, while I was very intimidated by the due date I tended to let senioritis take too strong of roll in my completion of the paper. The winter research paper was by far the most challenging assignment the entirety of the time I spent in senior inquiry. I personally had the “lovely” experience of having to start my research paper over twice and reform my question about five times over, before truly having everything solid enough for me to be able to incorporate any effective data. This factor alongside procrastination if you could imagine, gifted me with many sleepless nights and an undying addiction to coffee. While although I had to learn the hard way through those two assignments how to efficiently manage my time, I managed to successfully redeem myself on my spring research paper. By the time the spring research paper rolled around I was fully equipped with the skills to correctly manage my time according to my writing ability and speed. While although I did get one score of 2 on my spring research paper, I was able to improve the rest of scores to either a 3 or 4 which is an incredible improvement compared to my winter research paper. Time management as I’ve learned, is an essential skill not only in the classroom but in the field of employment as well. The sleepless nights and countless cups of coffee were entirely worth it.
As my class began to dive into depth on the diversity of the human experience, my peers and I had the opportunity to peer review each other’s personal context narratives. My personal experience with the PCN’s I had no idea how to go about it at first. When I wrote my first draft I was so unsure just how deep I should go or how much true emotion I should include in the paper. I felt very uncomfortable sharing my personal experiences and struggles with this group of people who I’m ashamed to admit, I had never seen before in my life. However, after peer reviewing my group member’s first drafts I felt much more comfortable from that point on using more emotion than I’d usually be comfortable with using in anything I wrote. This particular assignment more so than others taught me value’s outside of the educational realm. Peer reviewing the PCN’s of people I considered to be strangers was an extremely enlightening social experience. Peer reviewing their papers allowed me to open mind and broaden my initial perspectives of people. Although it may not seem important through the eyes of education, the PCN’s actually significantly made it easier for me to better understand and consider other perspectives that were not my own. This skill helped me immensely with the metamorphosis perspectives test and being able to have an understanding how each character such as Gregor and his sister may view and/or feel about the situation they were in. This skill also helped me improve on my spring research paper when it came to considering different sets of research.
Over all, senior inquiry has been the most effective and enjoyable class I have yet to take. Because of this class I feel much more informed on the world and definitely much more prepared for what lies ahead in the future for me. The time that we have spent with our PSU professor Dr.Bury has inspired me to pursue a second major in college of Social Anthropology. While we didn’t spend a lot of time on social anthropology she has taught me that it’s important to enjoy what you’re doing and to be informed on what’s happening in our world, which is exactly what social anthropology will do for me.