It’s a wonderful morning as you wake up to go to your 8AM ENGL 105 class. After 75 short minutes, it’s time to continue on with your day but, there’s only one place left to go: the library.
As our second week at Carolina comes to a close, many of us are already ready for this semester to finish and the next one to start. The hours of sleep are now on a steady decline, which have made mid-day naps much more appealing. In the first week, we worked long and hard to finish our extensive checklist of items for ENGL 105, from reading “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott to completing a lesson about plagiarism. Now, we are prepared to properly cite articles, books, and other resources in our projects with the proper format. This past week in ENGL 105, we learned about the many research resources we have available here at Carolina, the numerous offerings of the beautiful libraries, tips and tricks to make our research go more smoothly, and feedback from Paul, Mr. Guy, and our peers on our research topics. It was quite a fruitful week!
As our schedules get busier with club meetings, auditions and practices, more homework, and hanging out with new friends, we have started learning how to manage our time more efficiently and ensure we get our three meals in per day. Google calender, notion, paper agendas, notability, remindars, Apple calendar; so many options to choose from but which one works best for each of us? Surely, through coming weeks, we will get a better hang of organizing our lives but, so far, college life has been quite hectic.
This week, we started researching our first unit project of the semester, writing a research article. Leading up to class on Tuesday, we were tasked with reading and researching articles and topics that we would be interested in writing about. We scrolled through numerous articles about health topics and discoveries prevalent in today’s world and narrowed down our ideas. Having the freedom to write about anything that interests us will make writing the article and researching the topic more exciting for the coming weeks.
On Thursday, we got to visit the glorious undergraduate library and talk to Mr. Chriss Guy about the resources we are provided through to library to study, research, book rooms, and much more. We got a tour of the website and how to book private cubicles in the libraries (which was new knowledge I was excited to use so I booked a cube in Davis right after class!) We had the chance to explore website such as ScienceDaily, Google Scholar, and Articles+ to find information and keywords about our topics. Running ideas, research point, and keywords past our group members was incredibly useful in guiding our research towards a fuller and more informational direction. Also, creating a flow chart of key words and related topics for our research topics made it easier to see the end result of our articles. Personally, I was able to visualize my end product, easily add more ideas to my growing map, and see which gaps I needed to fill in my research.
I am excited to read everyone’s articles in the coming weeks and use everyone’s feedback on my own. Though adjusting to college life has been difficult and different for each one of us, it’s important to just take a breather and remember that everything will work out!
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