Personal Narrative: Improving My Academic Skills

In all honesty, I don't remember a lot about becoming literate. I didn't have a special moment or time when I knew that reading or writing going to take me somewhere. According to my mom she started to read to me when I was one, so there wasn't anything that could've excelled me much farther before going into kindergarten. One of the requirements in elementary school was to read every night which I believe was an important factor of me improving my literacy. Reading and writing used to me excite me because I would immerse myself into a book or write a whole new universe on a page. I made reading and writing something personal to me. I now realize that every book and every piece of writing can be worthwhile in one way or another.

During my two last years of high school, i've been in contact with a lot of colleges and universities. Many of which don’t get my attention. Throughout my whole high school years, there was only one college that i wanted to go to, Liberty University. I have heard so many wonderful things about Liberty and what i loved the most was that it was a christian school. Liberty had the number one thing that i am looking for in a college, that is a christian school, but many of my other things that i look for in a college where just not there. I used to live in Florida approximately 11 years ago and let me tell you, it's hard not to miss the sunshine state. Liberty is in Virginia, a state where it doesn't feel like home. When i received a brochure

Things really came around for me when I realized during the beginning of my junior year that my grades weren’t where I wanted them to be, so I made a conscious decision to be a better version of myself. I stopped being indifferent about school and put the same amount of effort I applied in sports to my everyday studies. Constantly improving my test and quiz scores just like my shooting percentage in basketball and my batting average in baseball. I took the same lesson my mom taught me and applied it to where it matters the most, in school.

I have had good experiences with the math lab, writing lab on multiply occasions. I enjoyed going to the math lab because everyone in there was working on similar stuff and it was very quiet, so I taught myself when I’m at the math lab its’s time to do homework. While at the writing I have worked on multiply English assignments there and every time I have gone there they have been very helpful. There have been numerous times I have walked passed the cafeteria with there being a signup sheet for some type of club to join. When the semester first began parking was horrible there is nowhere to park, and you are lucky to find a spot close to campus but do not worry about that cause as the semester continues people will withdrawal from campus and more spots will open up so just make sure you do leave the house early the first quarter of the semester. The best part about college is that you are in full control of everything that you do. You are in control of what classes you take and when you have to go to class. The bookstore is a little over priced when it comes to snacks, but they do offer very affordable school supplies so just make sure you stop by the store before you go to class to get

I have improved in many different aspects during this semester, three to be specific. With each passing semester, I have grown, and matured as a student and also as a woman. This semester has been a completely different experience, due to my transition from high school to college. Over time, I have learned many things that contribute to making myself a better student. The three key improvements that I have made this semester include, mastering my time management skills, taking advantage of professors office hours, and improving bad study habits. These three components have helped me improve myself this semester.

During this semester, one of the biggest challenges I struggled with had to do with the way I was managing my time. If it was not for the time management project, I would have not realized how much time I waste spending time with friends and doing other activities instead of my studies. I discovered that this was the primary reason why my grades

I have never taken an online class so I am actually very nervous on how it will go. Also, being an honors course, which I’ve never taken doesn’t make things a little better. I really enjoy writing about specific topics or ideas. Writing creatively isn’t me, but anything to help improve my writing skills. Hopefully all goes well and I pass the course to continue to move on in my degree plan.

This semester seems like a tough one for you, but you were able to grow as a student because of it. My first semester in college was a bit easier, but the second semester was a challenge. At the beginning of the semester one of the first assignments was a reading readiness survey. I found it to be an interesting assignment because we really had to dig deep for answers and break down how we think we are as readers. A particular question asked how what three to four adjectives describe me as a reader and I answered with detailed, reflective, and stimulating. At the beginning of the semester I thought I felt that way, but as I went through the course I developed more strategies for reading and ways to understand what I am reading. Ever since

I have learned that I need to work harder on fighting procrastination and distractions, If I can sit down and just write a little bit a few times a day, I can get it done with more wiggle room. More time to play and not having to worry about the assignment in the back of my mind. Maybe asking for help from a real human being, with ideas and outside knowledge rather than relying on computer programs that only work with what I already have written

Based on what I know about succeeding in college, the three specific points of advice I would offer to a new college freshman are time management, self-awareness and diligence. As you know, going to school is not the only thing we have to do in student’s life; we also have to go work part time to support our family and earn more experience. Therefore, time management is really important because it teaches us to take full advantage of every minute wisely to stay productive in both work and school. Self-awareness is very necessary for college students; it improves our strong areas as well as weak areas; also helping us to get the work done on time because self-awareness is the first step of goal setting. College is the last step that determines how your future looks like because diligence shows how much effort, earnest and energy we put in; helping us accomplish all the assigned tasks so we make a big move toward our

I have also realized that there are going to be many times you have to scrap ideas and start over. This semester I have realized that I try and perfect my assignments too much to where I start to crunch on time because it wasn’t to my expectation and I started over to many times, that there is in fact a way that too much thought can be put into a paper to where it becomes cluttered. The biggest growth I’ve seen over this semester is overall just my writing in general. At the beginning, my writing was very basic. My sentences were all around the same size and it was just not at the level of writing I would have liked it to be. The biggest thing that helped me with this over the semester would be just reading and editing mine as well as other peers’ papers. Towards the end of the semester it became easier to write, whether it was a personal, research, or

This last semester, Fall, has been really beneficial to me. During this semester, I worked in many projects including four essays, grammar exercises, and other group activities. Although in the beginning of the semester I had some problems drafting and mainly revising my essays, now I feel more prepared to deal with all of these.

And it’s an experience that I offer to current college freshmen to learn from. But, even more valuable than my lessons learned, is your own experience. I want to lock down and be completely focused on school and get the grades I want. College is way more enjoyable when you are getting good grades. At one point during my first semester my grades weren’t too good, and I wasn’t enjoying college. I was always stressed out and worrying constantly. Every time I went to sleep I would worry, and it really affected me. Now, I started the semester off strong and I’m really enjoying college and I have no worries in the back of my mind Everyone has a different adjustment to college. Maybe you’re the one who can and will hit the ground running. Or maybe you’re like me, and you just need to learn to be patient. So, even if you feel like you’re not getting what you want out of college, just realize that it is an experience for you to learn and grow from. Because this is just the

The first thing that we did in this class that helped the most was creating a planner that included the dates given in all our class syllabuses. This helped me the most since my math class has homework due twice each week, so having a planner allowed me to not confuse the idea that 2.1 is due on Thursday instead of Tuesday. This also helped me with thinking about how much time I have until the next project is due. Other time management skills that helped was goal setting and learning better study skills. The goal setting that helped was realizing what a SMART goal is; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant, and Timely. For this semester, I was able to realize that unlike High School where I could set a goal of getting As and Bs, in college this is unrealistic. My new goal became that I would like to get a grade at or above a C+ and if my grade started dropping before the end of the semester, I would ask the teacher about the topic I was not understanding before the test came. Getting help is also a great study skill, which for myself involved going to Supplemental Instruction Tutoring sessions each week for Statistics, which involved a teachers’ assistant that went over harder topics such as Z-tables vs. T-tables. This made my test grades increase and the SIT session also applies to outside of class resources that we learned about in this class. The activity of a treasure hunt for those resources especially helped since I had not known were the write cite was

This semester was one of the hardest semesters in my life. One of the reasons for it being the hardest semester is because it was my first year doing precalculus. I had to know background knowledge on precalculus so I wasn’t prepared for the hard topics. In addition to precalculus, I had my first college level, classes. I have never done college classes before and I thought that they would be the same as regular classes but I would just have a small amount of extra homework to do. I ended up figuring out that there was a lot of reading involved and I hate reading. This year I have really improved in these 3 habits of mind. First one was “Striving for Accuracy”, Second was “Questioning and Problem Posing”, And lastly was “Thinking Flexibly”.