During Week 12 of our class, many students and faculty members across campus prepared for the upcoming final exam season and to hopefully rush Franklin St with a historic victory in the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament. The men’s team traveled all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana to take on their biggest rival – the Duke Blue Devil’s for the first time in an NCAA tournament, and in the Final Four round to determine who would go on to the last season game and become the annual champions.
Closer to home, and with a more academic focus, our class began our third and final unit on Writing in the Health Humanities, which will culminate in students submitting an illness narrative after interviewing people with various conditions.
In Tuesday’s class, Unit 3 was introduced and we touched on our UP2 reflections and relationships between the humanities, health humanities and narrative medicine. We also learned about the goals writers have when they publish works in these fields, and the genres they tend to use. We were also expected to pick our UP3 topics and interviewees – mine will be a resident of Chapel Hill who has Crohn’s disease. From here, Thursday’s class was about the difference between citation styles (specifically compared to MLA 8th edition), and providing feedback on each other’s feeder 3.1 assignments. This feeder was in the form of an analysis worksheet which we used to draft out our ideas on who we would like to interview and what our goals with our illness narratives will be.
While it’s nice that the end of the semester, and for many of us – our first year of college at UNC – is coming to an end, I can’t help but feel anxious because as the semester goes on, the tougher things have become. To add to the stresses of the school year, it is now time to make summer plans – whether they be vacationing, applying to jobs and internships, or planning for summer school. However, the only thing to do is power through and continue pushing and working until the very end!
Like many first years, the seemingly endless stress of the spring semester has definitely had a large impact on me, especially with my time management and work ethic. But in between going to classes, rehearsals and trying to maintain a social life, there have been many instances where it was manageable to balance work and school.
To reflect on our units and assignments so far, I am definitely most excited for our illness narratives because they involve conversing with someone one on one and giving them a voice. One of my future aspirations is to extend healthcare to those who don’t always have access to a suitable amount of resources, and being able to share someone’s experience seems like a great start to learning about how I can go about this goal throughout the rest of my undergraduate career.
Hopefully our men’s basketball team will have one of the most thrilling Tar Heel victories of all time, and as Coach Davis is anticipating, they’ll bring home another banner. In the meantime, it’s interview time for our class, and then we’ll go on to prepare for the final weeks of the semester. I’m sure that all of the stress of the semester will pay off and every one of us will likely look back on this time and congratulate ourselves for making it through!
Featured Image Source :
After Love’s heroics to beat Duke in Final Four, UNC men’s hoops pivots to title game. Daily Tar Heel. 3 April, 2022. https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2022/04/unc-mens-basketball-duke-final-four-caleb-love-shot-duke