The first happened in my dreadful English 2 class this semester. Well, it's not so dreadful now since I learned a lot from my professor and now I am doing much better. At first, it felt like all the essays I wrote for the class just was not good enough for her. I always did something wrong; either my thesis was not strong enough or the rest of the essay did not relate much back to my thesis, or I did not analyze enough, or I did not use specific quotes from the books, or I did not have transitions between my paragraphs. After every essay, I tried to take in her criticism and write better and one day I succeeded. My professor always read aloud the ones she thought were the best. One class, she was handing back all the papers that she graded and I was confused because I did not get mine back. Then she started talking to the class about a student who has the ability to learn from her mistakes and use criticism to her benefit. Then she said my name aloud and said that it was not hard to give me a perfect score compared to the essays that the rest of the class wrote. I felt so accomplished and proud when she was reading my essay out loud. It seemed as if I finally understood how to write thesis based essays and I started appreciating how much she actually taught me over the course of one semester. Now every time I go to her for extra explanation on future material, she always tells that she is not worried about me and sure enough, I get good grades. Last week, she was telling everyone where they stood, in terms of grades, in the class. Out of a total of 40 points so far, I have 41.25. I hope I do well on the final research paper to maintain my average in this class.
There is this program I applied to in March 2012. It is called New York Needs You (NYNY). It is a program to help first generation college students go through college and prepare them for career opportunities. The program does this in a number of ways: mentoring, career networking through various workshops. NYNY selects about a hundred people for their program each year. I was chosen to be one of the two hundred finalists! The finalists go through a one-on-one interview and a group activity. At first, I was more nervous about the group activity because you have to work with five other people on a challenge but at the same time, you have stand out in one way or another. Our challenge was to create a board game to help high school students through the college process, but we had to finish it and present in 45 minutes. The time flew by and it was actually a lot of fun. I got an opportunity to meet interesting people from different schools around New York City. I really hope I did well and I pass this round as well, so I can finally get accepted to NYNY.
A couple of weeks ago, I found out I got into the Dean's List for the Fall 2011 semester. One for one, now I have to maintain my GPA for this semester and the following ones to come so I can be on the list for every semester!
I also applied for this internship at the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health in the Health Science Academy. I would work with children, primarily middle school kids, and help them through various projects over a summer. I attended an interview for that internship a couple of weeks ago and this would be a good experience for me. I get to work with the youth on science activities, projects, and coursework. This would help me on my road to being a pediatrician because it gives me hands-on work with children and science-related material. The only problem that is stopping me from that internship is the fact that I signed up to finish Chemistry 2 in the summer. The class literally takes up the whole day, four days a week, starting mid-July. I want to finish Chemistry so I can be free from it for the Fall 2012 semester. However, I did talk to a coordinator about my schedule and she said I might still be able to intern on Fridays.
I attended a pre-health workshop last week run by the pre-health adviser from my college. I am going to read more of The Wall Street Journal and the science portion of The New York Times to help me prepare for the MCATs.
Finals are coming up. It is now the home stretch for freshmen year. I want to end this year trying my best to maintain my 3.935 GPA so I can have a solid foundation for the next three years.
