Despite our start to the week being the five flight trek up the stairs due to the broken elevator, it has been a good second week! As the Weeks of Welcome come to an end, we can really start to settle into a solid routine on campus. It’s been nice not having to use Google Maps to get to each class (mostly), knowing which dining hall is better (Lenoir, obviously), and learning to decide which breaks in the day should be naps and which should be spent in the library (actually I’m still struggling with this one). With settling in, it’s also been nice to get to know the other people in the class a little better, especially group mates as they’ll eventually be helping to peer edit our projects.
In our first class of the second week of school, we started to really understand and investigate what it means to write in the Natural Sciences, exploring the writing conventions, the fields it covered, and the research it writes about. Then, we started to delve deeper into our first unit project and decide the topic we wanted to write on. After lots of brainstorming in our groups, most of us had settled down with a topic that felt interesting enough to write about for the next month. With lots of compelling ideas like the effects of fragrances in cosmetics, screen time on children, and sleep on the mind, it already seems like an interesting start to the unit.
Following our initial explorations on these topics, we went on a field trip to the library (sans Magic School Bus) and learned about the plethora of resources available to us as students at UNC. We learned about the countless study rooms, twelve different libraries, one-on-one meetings with librarians, and more. Not only did we learn about the resources and how to use them, but we immediately put them to use by hunting in Articles+ for information that would benefit our projects. The keyword brainstorming, refresher of how to refine our search for specific keywords and phrases, and demonstration of its filter system all came in very handy for finding scholarly articles. Its database was also incredibly extensive and had articles on topics I’d never had a second thought about, like why diet soda is denser than regular soda or how damaging regular Tylenol usage can be. Beyond the ridiculous amount of access UNC students have to almost any academic resource, the other thing that truly impressed me was the one-on-one meetings with librarians meant only for ENGL 105 students. It seems like such an incredible opportunity to talk with someone who is genuinely very knowledgeable, not only about what you’re attempting to do but also the resources that will help you achieve your goal.
Now as we approach our next class, we work to start the first steps of what will eventually turn out to be 15% of our final grade with our rough draft of Feeder 1.1. Though mine is slightly rougher than it probably should be, I look forward to sharing it with my group mates and doing our first in class workshop. Provided the elevator makes a full recovery, here’s to hoping this next week goes as well as our first two!
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(Photo by Colin Rowley on Unsplash)