My name is Muskan Shukla (she/her), and I am a second-year student planning to do a major in English and a minor in History. I am from India, but I have lived in Latin America for 13 years of my life, in which I spent my last two years of schooling in India. I have lived in Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. I did my first year’s first term of UBC in India, and my second term in Bogota, Colombia. I have always been interested in English and History and figuring that has been one of the main challenges at UBC. From these two interests, I realized that I have a passion for reading. Reading is one of my hobbies. I had decided to take electives or courses that include various readings from my interest in reading. Thus, I had decided to take this course since it seemed interesting when I read about the course, and therefore this class is now an elective for me.
The expectation that I have for this course is to be a means to grow my current understanding of literature. I have limited knowledge of Latin American literature even though I have lived in Latin American countries. I also expect that the readings give me historical perspectives in their given times which would help grow my knowledge regarding my possible minor. Through the information provided to expand my knowledge, I would want the information to also develop my writing skills. My writing skills are not the best since, at times, I am not able to articulate what exactly I want to present clearly. Through the process of writing blog posts, my writing skills would grow and be challenged to present ideas in the form of a blog post.
After the first RMST 202 lecture, what I found interesting about the course was the way that the course was structured. I saw how we can choose which texts to read and somewhat predetermine our grade to be different from the other courses that I have taken at UBC. The difference between this course and other UBC courses regarding the structure makes the course much more appealing and exciting, in my opinion. Additionally, the openness in the course could also be a reflection of Romance Studies itself since Romance Studies is not bound to one specific discipline. Instead, the lack of imagining a particular field for Romance Studies allows for the explorations of texts and sources to be much more enjoyable. One question that I have after the first lecture is; are there any other disciplines similar to Romance Studies that are not bound to a specific field?
I am incredibly excited about this course and the learnings I will gain from it!