Hello everyone!

My name is Fiona Zeng and I am a third-year Economics and Commerce student here at UBC. After completing my post-secondary studies, I plan to work remotely in business while travelling around the world to explore new countries and create unforgettable memories. During early childhood, I was raised in Toronto before moving to Vancouver. Ever since then, I have only been loving this city more and more. During the hotter months, I’ll spend time with family and friends jumping in cool lakes, hiking beautiful trails, and exploring Vancouver Island. In the colder months, we go up the mountains to find refuge in cabins and bundle up to go skiing in the fresh snow. I love how close the busy city is to beautiful nature.

As for my expectations for this course, I hope that it expands my perspective and way of thinking. Growing up in Canada, I think that there is a lot of international history and culture that is oftentimes excluded from elementary and high school curriculums, so it would be amazing to learn new topics from this class. Additionally, I expect to learn how to read and accurately interpret literature texts and expose myself to books that I never would’ve picked myself in stores. By the end of this semester, I wish to have further developed my critical thinking skills and advanced my writing abilities. Literature classes that are heavy in reading and text analysis are quite new to me and pose an untried challenge. There seem to be a lot of readings in this class, so I hope it’s not too overwhelming and stressful to keep up. I find it difficult to interpret non-fictional texts, especially in the history genre, but I am excited to delve into this new semester and hear all the ideas and thoughts of my classmates.

Because I just joined this class yesterday night, I missed the first in-person lecture. But from watching the two videos attached under “Week 1,” the goals of this course were made clear. Not going to lie, I’m a little intimidated by the phrases and unfamiliar vocabulary used, but hopefully, it will become easier as I attend more classes. A question I wonder is how everyone’s perception of the Romance world changed after watching the videos. For me, it was bewildering to learn that there is no Romance World and that languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian are not Latin but mutants of the language instead, establishing new identities for themselves and carving their own place in history. After watching the video lectures, I realized that I really need to brush up on my world history and geography knowledge, I know this course will do just that and more. See you all in class soon!