Hi my name is Adia, and I’m a second year Political Science major with a minor in Law and Society. Hopefully, the title of my website isn’t extremely cringe. If I can remember, since I was a young kid, I’ve always wanted to have my blog for specifically, lifestyle, fashion, beauty, books, and films- essentially it all. I think in many ways, RMST 202 so far is rekindling many old dreams and passions of mine. Like how I used to read a lot! The basement in my childhood home was like a library, as I had shelves and boxes of books. Definitely, growing up takes on in odd ways. I felt like I had to personally grow out of reading to leave room for building a social life, a good academic life, and such. I’m probably not making any sense, because you’d think there’s a lot of space to still keep hobbies, but in reality it’s the lack of time during a pivotal life stage for many young people. I also felt the pressure at around the awkward middle school aged phase of “reading is boring, not cool.” Though, my parents were always nagging me to continue reading.

Anyway, the expectations that I have for this class (mostly for myself) is to leave this course with a more knowledge than I came here with, getting back my thriving passion for reading after years (it feels like forever) and a solid grade. I’m excited to have a contract based grading scale. I’ve had it on a smaller scale before in a course at UBC called ASTU, where students were posting blogs about ‘talks’ that we have attended. However, it does make me a bit overwhelmed, as I can underestimate myself but also overestimate myself. I think many students at UBC have experienced being very humbled by completing certain assignments/tasks in other courses. Where you may feel as if you’ve done well, whereas the grade doesn’t illustrate that. For this reason, I won’t aim for an A+. But something high enough that I can challenge myself to do, whist preventing a breakdown. After all, reading that many literature books can be quite difficult, especially if you have a full course load, with other courses requiring a lot of reading as well.

As for the lecture video, I gathered the importance of challenging the texts that we’re going to read in this class, to put them side by side, identifying commonalities and differences, and the openness of Romance Studies as its not bound by specific territories or nation-states. I can’t wait to see the divergence of Romance languages from Latin.