My First Week Back At School | Syllabi Are Stressing Me Out But I (Surprisingly) Don’t Mind Having An 8 AM Class

At the end of the first week of both semesters of freshman year, I posted a quick update concerning my initial impressions about my classes… so I’ve decided to continue that tradition this year! It’s fun to look back on my first thoughts about these classes and see how they compare to the opinions I have at the end of all those weeks.

You can read more about this semester’s classes here.

Prose Style

This is the first 8 AM class I’ve had here at college! I’m feeling surprisingly OK about it, though – it helps that the classroom has an east-facing window, so at least the morning sunlight streams in. I’d hate it if we were stuck in a dull, gloomy room that early! This first week we talked about our favorite sentences and why they work as sentences. It was a lot of fun to see the diversity of sentences in that room – people listed favorites from books, movies, TV, video games, and more!

Foundations of the English Major

Two of my friends have already told me that I’m working too hard in this class, but THE SYLLABUS LOOKS KINDA INTIMIDATING. We have to know a bunch of vocabulary for quizzes and tests, and it should come in handy for discussions and papers as well. So I’ve been laboriously researching and then writing definitions for each and every word. Right now my vocab notes are longer than my in-class notes!

Media Shift

I did about half of the readings for this course before the semester even started and now I’m SO happy that I did that! We’re currently reading Ben Franklin’s autobiography, which is rather dense, so I’m glad that I did the accompanying readings during the week I was home from school so I can really hit the ground running.

Journalistic Reporting & Writing

So this course is taken in conjunction with Intro to Multimedia Storytelling, and I am already Officially Confused by the syllabus because both classes have soooo many projects and many of the deadlines match up. Clearly I need to spend more time reading it this weekend?! I don’t think learning to write like a journalist will be difficult, but I’m super worried that I’ll miss an assignment here or there because there’s just SO MUCH on the schedule(s) that something may slip under my radar. Time to pull out my planner and start scribbling down dates!

Introduction to Multimedia Storytelling

I can’t wait until we move on to more complex assignments in this class! The first one we did (in discussion section) was all about setting up a WordPress site and I was just like… I could totally walk everyone through this tutorial in my sleep. I could CREATE a better tutorial in my sleep.

I probably shouldn’t feel too superior, though, because pretty soon we’ll move on to stuff like editing audio and video, which I have never done before. OH WAIT I JUST HAD A THOUGHT. Once I know how to do those things I can finally start making my own vlogs! Yessss!

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What classes are you taking this fall? What are your initial impressions about them? (And of your teachers?!)