Capstone Essay Reflection

My name is Sammie Spisak. I was born on July 19,1999 in Bridgeport, CT. I grew up in Fairfield, CT and I am the oldest in my family. I have two younger siblings, who are twins named Matt and Molly. They both just started their first year of high school. I have two dogs Georgia and Sophie, both Tibetan Terriers. My mom and dad both grew up in Fairfield. My mom is one of 7 and my dad has a sister. There are five sets of twins on my mom’s side of the family. I am one of 26 cousins.

My names is Teresa Esperanza Ahumada. I was born in Walnut Creek on January 28th. Before I moved to Brentwood when I was 6, I lived in Antioch. I live with my mother, grandparents, and two brothers named Nick and Marcus. I am the middle child so as you can imagine it gets crazy. I also have a dog named Duke. He loves to jump on Marcus.

Frederick Douglass, an African-American writer that I look up to, once said,"We have to do with the past, only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.” This quote was meaningful to me during my 8th-grade-year. In my early years of school, When I was born, I had my tongue attach to the bottom of my mouth. My parents did not fix the problem until I was three years old. Because they waited so long, I developed a speech impediment that hinders my ability to pronounce certain words. Central York School District made me take a Reading test that determines where I would be placed in English. The tests were against me every time I take the test. I hate being in the remediation course, because of the course I was restricted to have the freedoms that my other classmates had. My 8th-grade-year change how I see English today.

8th grade was great I wasn’t the youngest, I was in the oldest grade. At this point I had middle school perfectly handled. Going to high school and being a freshman is terrifying you're the smallest you don’t know what a seminar B is and when you go to it. I loved middle school. I love high school; the only reason that I love it is because I have middle school to reflect off of. I have those experiences to help me have more. I use middle school to reflect and learn from everything that I did. I’m doing well in high school so far only because I have I have past experiences so that I can make choices that best benefit me now. Arnold Spirit from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and the Narrator from “The Bass, The River and Sheila Mant” are reflective because they both took action while being unique making it much harder than necessary. At the end of it they learned a valuable lesson and made the best decision for themselves.

Business Policy: A Team-Based Approach is the capstone that I selected for my degree plan. This course will round out all of the business core and concentration requirements by integrating their business principles and should provide me with a firm foundation in business decision making and problem solving. The prerequisites for this course are management principles, marketing principles, human resource management, corporate finance, or equivalents. All of which are addressed in this essay.

It is still so surreal to reflect back on my first semester as an incoming college student in the ENC1101 course, analyzing at my progression as a reader and writer in literacy. Since the first day of class I set in stone my goals for this class: receive a 4.0 GPA, develop my connecting theories skills in writing, and become more aware of objectives for each Unit throughout the course. All of these goals became achievements that not only make others proud but most importantly give me self pride. In order to earn the grades and achieve these goals, I went after every opportunity that I was given as an incoming college student, such as office hours and extra credit. By taking this course I have gained confidence with the utilization of literacy, and made an addition to my group of impactful literacy sponsors. Once students are finished with high school they assume that there is nothing else to learn beyond the stereotypical five paragraph essay, but they are so wrong. I was able to obtain so much knowledge about numerous course concepts from Writing about Writing, articles, and my professor. These concepts will carry on with me throughout a bright future of writing courses, job interviews, and any other skills that require literacy. The four outcomes listed below will help illuminate how I improved as a writer, by being a driven college student and going out of the way to earn my achievements in this course. In the first outcome I improved comprehending scholar texts,

Throughout the time that I was in high-school I have taken many English classes leading up to this Ivy Tech class. During my freshman year I was required to participate in English 9 which required students to do more reading than writing. During my sophomore year I took English 10 that involved more reading. Then last year I took AP Language and Composition for college credits. Reading and writing were split 50/50. We were required to read a new book every nine weeks and be quizzed. We also wrote a total of six MLA formatted essays to prepare for the AP exam at the end of the year. I think my classmates and I were taught well which resulted in a good score on my exam.

At the beginning of the semester I was overwhelmed by the idea of having to present for such long periods of time in front of my peers. I was confident in my ability to understand the CRISPR/Cas9 topics that I chose to research, but was unsure of my ability to present that information in a way that was made sense to my classmates. Discerning how I was going to put together each of the presentations after having gathered all of the information was one of the most time consuming aspects of this course.

Have you ever just felt like high school was too easy? Well I have because I felt like the teachers just passed you on. They didn’t give me a challenge like I was supposed to have and from that being, now I have to prepare myself for the college life and teach myself the things I was supposed to be taught in high school. The school I came from didn’t have a math teacher or a history teacher all year so we just sat in the class rooms and played everyday all day and I still ended up passing and that school was Albany Early College. They told me that I would finish high school with an associate degree but all I got was a discombobulated school and an uncontrolled school. The next school I went to didn’t care either. They showed me that I can skip class everyday and still pass with an A average. Despite all the things I didn’t get taught in high school, I did learn some unique aspects that I can reflect on and use for college. The skills I reflect on are annotating, using the Cornell note-taking system, and how to be on time for school.

After reading my first reflection, I realize I was very hopeful about high school in the beginning of the year. However, now I have mixed feelings about high school, since my first year did not go as I had anticipated. My first reflection mentioned how I thought the first month of high school was quite unexpected. Little did I know how unexpected ninth grade would turn out. I could never have imagined what would happen to me this year. Certain aspects were thrilling, exciting, hilarious; however, other aspects were depressing, anxiety-inducing, and highly stressful. I was incredibly naive and starry-eyed in the beginning of the year. However, I feel as if I am now an experienced adult looking down upon a young, innocent child, while secretly knowing that my younger self has yet to face the brutal, harsh, and unforgiving world. Nonetheless, there is always a wiser, more experienced elder looking down upon me.

Is the glass half full or half empty is a question that many people ask themselves to determine whether they are more optimistic or pessimistic. It is easy to see every glass as half empty, but with a change in your mindset, you can see every glass as being half full. At every football game, cheerleading competition, and band competition, having an optimistic mindset has helped me have a lot more fun than I would have had with a pessimistic mindset.

The “Nonstop” article showcased many student’s experiences that I can completely relate to, especially Becky Cooper’s situation described in the first sentence of the article. All throughout high school, even when I felt sick and didn’t want to go to school, I would tell myself, “I can’t miss school. I’ll have too much to catch up on the next day.” I couldn’t get myself to miss a school day in fear of falling behind and missing out on a productive day at school. The idea of always being productive and having something to do is something that always fills my mind, which is evident in the article. When the article describes Becky Cooper’s everyday life, the need to feel productive and busy is something that I could relate to. Throughout high

I had butterflies in my stomach and, my heart raced an “Allegro con brio” of one hundred forty-four beats per minute, in sync with the tempo of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in C Major. Waiting anxiously for the conductor’s cue, I was ready to play the first chord of the masterwork. I had practiced tirelessly for this audition and visualized this big day, performing with my college orchestra in front of an eagerly awaiting panel of judges. As I reached the cadenza (virtuoso solo passage), I knew it was not my best, despite all the hours of hard work I had put in. Extremely upset, I knew from that moment on that I was not going to be selected as this year’s orchestral pianist. However, I did not let it bring me down. There are always

At the start of interviewing my father, Henry, about maturing into adulthood while in college, he sat down wearing his usual thick glasses, blue starched polo shirt, fresh boot-cut jeans, and bright facial expression; he wanted to share his past with his son in hopes of teaching me lessons from his experiences. When I asked questions, he, as always, answered with much confidence. I soon came to realize that this trait was caused by his college days where he obtained self-reliance. To understand his journey, we must observe the phases that took him to his current state.

When i first entered this class I didn't know what to expect because our school’s english teachers are so unique in character. I knew for certain that the class was gonna be challenging just because it is an Ap class, but I never expected it to change how i see the world. I have never experienced the type of environment we had as a class in my thirteen year, pre-kinder to eleven grade, of learning. From forming a cult, to engaging in rigourous conversations, to just having moments where we go on off topic and this has brought us closer. I can't forget to mention the fact that we actually learn a few things. Well a lot of important things actually. The course has elevated my English skill in comprehension, writing, speech, and has shifted the way I interact with the world as i search for a deeper meaning because of the influence of the class’ environment.