Hello, dearest reader, and welcome to my final blog post. I’d like to quickly thank you, dearest reader (whoever ‘you’ may be) for reading up until now. It’s been a pleasure writing these blog posts, and I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I did writing them. This blog post will be a recap of my experience in ASTU which will include (most) of the things I’ve learned, my favourite part of the course, what I did well in, and addressing the mistakes I made in this class and how I could improve on them moving forward.
This class really pushed me to further improve my writing skills and gave me the tools to transition from a high school to university level of writing. Did my grades translate on the same level? Nope, but that’s to be expected like when finding the rhythm to a piece of music or adjusting to a different recipe (yeah, adjusting, that’s it). The point is that ASTU, regardless of my grade, gave me the tools to write a great essay. The most notable feature I learned was the “discursive ‘I'” as the usage of ‘I’ is discouraged in my high school, and this feature definitely made essay writing a lot more flexible.
My favourite part of the entire course was definitely the dramatization of The Reluctant Fundamentalist because it was extremely enjoyable (reminded me of my high school theater days) and allowed me to connect with the text a lot more. And the dramatization was probably what I the best in the entire year, because I definitely didn’t do as well as I could have in terms of writing and analyzing text. Again, it’s to be expected because of the transition period, and external distractions like social media and the internet in general did not help me stay focused. But at the same time, I’m thankful that what happened, happened, because now I know what my faults are and knowing is half the battle. With new found confidence, I can now face the next year head-on knowing that everything I’ve learned from my peers and professors will carry-on and support me in the future.