Not just another blog

Hello and welcome to my journey in ASTU at UBC! I hope you enjoy your time here on my blog. During the first few classes of my ASTU course, it was kind of like a wake up call to myself that I am no longer in High School where I had teachers baby sitting me and guiding me through life. Instead, I am a fully independent women that has been thrown out into the real world. You know what I found interesting? In High School, I was taught to write all my essays structured in the way my teachers required me to, but now in university I am told to forget all the techniques I have acquired from the past 5 years and to learn how to write a “proper university paper.” I am baffled by this and do not know where to start. But thankfully I have the Academic Writing: An Introduction textbook to guide me through this transition. Also, something interesting that I had found out on my first day, teachers no longer exist, instead,  theres a new species called “professors.”

I have recently just read my first university article The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning by Farhat Shahzad which is about her studies on the War of Terror. She has interviewed 99 university students to observe their view on the War of Terror and what has influenced them. She notes that there are 3 important concepts on remembering and learning this topic; the person him/herself, the internet, and memories.

I myself personally do not read all the gritty nitty details about current events or the past major catastrophes, but I gain knowledge about them from people’s experiences and memories. I listen to friends, family, and my teachers on the view and opinion on them. In my perspective, I believe that someone can truly educate themselves by going to monuments and museums to learn about the past events that has occurred in our world.

I feel as if sometimes as us humans, we are bias and do not look at both sides of a situation and we tend to only highlight the negatives and not the positives. Sometimes the news on television, such as FOX news, do not tell us the entire story of an event. I feel as if after the 9/11 incident, everyone in the middle east were seen as a terrorist, but in reality, they are not. A group of people had attacked USA and all of a sudden, everyone in the middle east is now seen as the bad guy? There are so many amazing achievements that have occurred in the middle east such as how Malala fought for education for not only herself but for all the girls against the Taliban.

In the past couple of weeks that I have been in the Global Citizenship CAP program, I have realized a bigger picture in life, the world is no where close to perfect.  As a student, I need to learn the flaws and strengths in our world to create a better future. ASTU, Sociology, and Political Science has really made me think critically and has given me a wake up call to engage in the world and to stop focusing on the irrelevant news about celebrities.

Here is a link of Malala’s biography:

http://www.biography.com/people/malala-yousafzai-21362253 

Photo retrieved from http://eyesopenreport.com/tag/911/