1:1 INTRODUCTION
Hi everyone! I am really looking forward to reading all of your blog posts this semester, and being able to comment and communicate with you all! I work full-time at Vancity Credit Union, so all of my classes are online. I am a fourth-year student and am majoring in Psychology, and plan to graduate in May 2021 after completing five years at UBC. I was born and raised in Vancouver, so this truly is home for me. My favourite areas of study are the neuroscience of motivation, the study of childhood and aging, and personality development. This past semester I studied abroad in Paris, and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. While in Paris, one of my favourite courses I took was a smart and popular culture course, which focused on decolonization and feminist movements across Europe and America. I had never traveled to Europe before, and the culture shock was quite extreme. I took courses in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century European history and French language courses.
In English 372, I am excited to review and learn more about Canadian literature and analyze the intersections between European and Indigenous traditions of literature. This course offers a much larger scope of information I have not been exposed to, which makes me extremely eager to learn. In my first year at UBC, I took GRSJ 224. Throughout this course, my favourite topic we learned about was the male gaze. My professor was able to relate the male gaze to so many different commercials, movies, and societal views. I also learned about the nation-state, and the struggle the Indigenous peoples are facing against the Canadians, which includes the destruction of their land and the extraction of oil (which is also destroying the land). In the GRSJ course, I also reviewed many different terms, and one was ‘White Privilege’, which is an invisible backpack of unearned basic assets that provide White people with the comfort they do not realize they are lucky to have. This was a term that was eye-opening as I felt it could be broadened as a first-world privilege backpack as well – being born in a first world country with free clean water, a roof over your head, and a bed to sleep in.
I am looking forward to participating in this online course. I have taken many online courses before in different areas such as Psychology and ADHE, and I enjoyed how each professor made the course interactive in different ways. The ADHE course I took used the UBC blogs as a platform and I found it to be a really good way to get the students interacting with each other in a comfortable atmosphere, and an easy way to share my thoughts. My favourite online Psychology class was the one I took last summer on research methods, and our final project was a video of ourselves reporting our hypothetical experiment we would conduct, outlining the introductions, methods, findings and discussion areas. I found this to be extremely interesting and engaging as a student! I am most excited for the group research paper, which will allow me to collaborate my ideas with other peers in this class.
Thank you to everyone for taking the time to read my blog and learn a bit more about me! I am looking forward to getting started with the course and reading all of your blog posts.
Works Cited:
The Local fr. “The French Culture Shocks You Should Be Prepared For.” The Local, 22 Jan. 2018, www.thelocal.fr/20180122/french-culture-shocks-that-no-one-tells-you-about.
Loreck, Janice, and School of Media. “Explainer: What Does the ‘Male Gaze’ Mean, and What about a Female Gaze?” The Conversation, 21 Oct. 2019, theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-the-male-gaze-mean-and-what-about-a-female-gaze-52486.