Dear Reader

Upon entering Hunter College, I had always decided to do my best to achieve and maintain high grades. I believed that if I were to study at Hunter College, I might as well put forth my best effort and try my best. I wanted to maintain about a B average or so and I think that I came close to achieving goals for this semester. The reason that I did not exactly achieve my goals would be due to the fact that I am bound to procrastinate whenever something seemed boring and difficult to me and my lack of confidence in actually finishing the work on time. I think that there are also many other reasons that I do not know of myself but the main thing is that I have a major tendency to procrastinate.
Struggles that I have encountered during my first semester at Hunter College would be the lack of actual written homework, the massive amounts of tests that we are given, and also the strange schedule. Every morning, I have to wake up at a different time that it is rather hard to adjust properly and to make sure that I am not late to any of my classes. I think that since I have always been used to have homework, not having homework was a negative for me. Homework always helped me to understand the material more and it always helped me realize what I was understanding and what I still needed help with, especially when the homework was reviewed during class. Now that I am taking classes at Hunter College, there isn't homework like there was in high school so it would be harder for me to understand the material. I now realize that homework was an important factor in school and now I have to get used to the lack of given homework. I've been able to pay more attention in class since there is no homework because if I don't pay attention properly, I realized that there would be no way I would be able to understand the material even if I read the textbook word for word. Although I do pay attention more in class, there are still times when I would fall asleep or lose interest in the topic so I would lose the ability to absorb the information that the professor gives us.
This semester, I took Pre-Calculus (Math 125) and Geography. To be honest, I personally think that I did horrible. I believe that I received a D or even worse in my Pre-Calculus class and maybe a C or B in my Geography. I am extremely scared that I may have failed both of my classes and I really do regret the fact that i have procrastinated so much. Now that the finals are over and classes are done for this semester, I need to wait for my grades and await my fate.
In a year, I see myself working extremely hard in my freshman year of college, working away my days and studying as hard as I possibly can. In five years, I would see myself in college still, studying away my life, having fun and going on trips every once in a while and working a part-time job to earn myself some money for food and other essentials. In ten years, I hope to be working as an intern at a nice company, training for my own career while I continued my education to get my degrees. To achieve all of this, I merely have to submit all of my college applications now, try to boost my grades back up as much as possible and just wait while continuing to try and do my best. I also have to mend my ways, to reduce procrastination in increase diligence.
As a writer, I am a fictional writer, a slightly dark and questioning one bust still a fictional writer. I think that to be a writer, one has to be able to imagine things that may or may not exist in this world and also must be able to accept what truth is. I think that I writer should be able to accept the fact that their minds would question the things that are written and not reject the written piece. My development of engaging a reader and expressing learning lessons within writing will help me in other subjects when there are essays to be written. With these techniques, i would be able to prevent my piece from boring the reader and they would be able to understand my work better if they were to be able to relate. These techniques would help me in life whenever I would have a conversation or if I wanted to write in my diary about something. I would be able to write or talk in a way that people can be entertained in a way while still keeping to the conversation.
I have learned so far that fiction writing does not have to be perfect. In fact, fiction isn't supposed to be perfect. Fiction starts from the thoughts that are written down on paper and can be as messy and sloppy as it can possibly be. As always, it would all be edited at some time before it is all read over and expanded upon again. Fiction is all about having fun with writing and just writing whatever one thinks. If someone thinks about what to write, it would lead them to a dead end and then the writer would over think. Fiction should be and is fun.
I particularly enjoyed Journal 8, the one where we were supposed to create a character or a few characters from the massive mess of items that the class drew on the board the day before. I thought that the entire process of this was fun and exciting even though the entire time the class was laughing at the items being drawn, I was calling the possible character a hoarder. It was absolutely enjoyable and I really look forward to something like that again in the near future. Another piece of writing that I enjoyed was Journal 2. I loved writing the story that I did and I am extremely proud of it.Concepts in fiction writing that have come easy for me would be the part that fiction was supposed to be believable, the fact that the piece is basically a lie in itself. I have a knack for keeping a straight face and being able to control myself while lying so many people would believe me. No, this skill is not something to be proud of but when it comes down to writing fiction, it comes in handy. Concepts that are still difficult to me? There are so many of them that still feel foreign to me that I can't even list them all. There are so many terms to remember and sometimes, so many rules in certain types of fictions that should be taken into account when writing a piece. Sometimes, I do feel overwhelmed by all the concepts and terms but at some point, when I sit down and try to write accordingly, it comes out rather naturally as long as I don't stick my mind to the fact that there's a concept.
By the end of the year, hope to be able to have learned many new ways of writing and many new ways of expressing myself through writing. I want to know more things that can help me improve my writing abilities and actually know how to apply these skills directly to other subjects. I hope that by the end of this year, I would have learned how to understand class materials without relying on homework to help me understand. I hope that this pre-college life experience would teach me how to survive in actual college.
This portfolio represents me as a writer and a person because many of the pieces that I rite always refer to my life and thoughts. Some of the writing are even from my imagination when it starts running wild, producing random scenes in my mind. Those scenes and my thoughts influence my writing and most of the time, it would be what I truly want to write.