Author Archives: Thomas

I have enjoyed my experience thus far at Baruch, with some minor problems. Baruch College had a friendly environment and was helpful for the most part. Most of the professors I had were interesting and knew their subject matter well. It has taught me lots of things in subjects that I knew nothing about, like art history. I also liked the wide availability of a variety of clubs and took the opportunity to join the Archery club. It has exceeded my expectations in the services offered to students. The free databases offered by the Library seem to be very useful, in addition to all the resources in the physical library. There was one area that did not live up to my expectations. That area was organization. This is because they assigned all incoming freshman a course schedule, then conflicted it with mandatory workshops instead of organizing the workshops in a way to avoid conflicts with other necessary classes. I think my first semester at Baruch went well. I have good grades in all my classes and am not struggling in any subject. Though that may be because I did not have a math this semester. If I could re-do my first semester, I would try to take a math course. Math is a necessity in my school, and after they dropped it from my schedule at orientation, I didn’t think to try to get it back on during the first day of school. I would also plan out workshop attendance weeks in advance and make sure nothing conflicted with them. I do not think I changed much since entering Baruch College. I try to procrastinate less now, but there has not really been much change other than that.

There are many different things that are currently hindering me from performing well. The reasons are different depending on the subject I am talking about. The medium of the work also affects it. Hopefully I can fix some of these problems soon.

Procrastination is my biggest problem and has always affected me. I’ve tried different ways to fight this, but none of them worked well. I’ve tried to schedule writing papers ahead of time, but that just made me procrastinate more. Another solution I’ve tried is to write the paper over an extended time length. This caused problems as ideas didn’t really flow well, I forgot to include necessary parts of the assignment, and I still tended to write over 75% of the paper on the night before it was due. I’ve tried to go to the library, free from computers and television, but that just made me waste time as I made extremely little progress on my reports. I just can’t seem to easily keep my attention on an assignment for an extended period of time. I guess that would also count as a time management issue, since I cannot seem to properly schedule a time for work and stick to it.

In class there are a couple of things that are hindering me. I am taking a class about government, which has the exact same subject matter as a class that I took in my junior year of high school. I don’t have anything against the teacher or the material, but I just can’t seem to find the repeated facts interesting in class and this makes the textbook boring to read. I also tend to fall asleep in some classes for extremely short periods of time. I think this is more from lack of sleep than anything else, so sleeping earlier should fix that problem. English and Philosophy present problems for me for the same reason. I don’t really understand poetry very well and have a hard time writing about it. I also have a very hard time understanding the concepts in philosophy. I’m not really used to the subjects talked about in that class and most of it goes over my head. Art History is different, I honestly came to the class with no interest in art. I also can’t seem to learn from the teacher’s teaching style. Memorizing all the times, dates, styles, and artists is very difficult. I am slightly off, but being slightly off is entirely incorrect. Some professors also have an attitude that makes learning difficult.

Presentations are a large part of my problem. I have always had problems with them and my solutions tend to cause other problems in a circular pattern. I have always been poor at social skills and that carries over into speech giving. I talk quietly and don’t maintain eye contact with the person I’m talking to so I have a difficult time maintaining eye contact with an entire audience. I have a bad memory so I’ll write things down on notes, but holding the note removes my ability to make gestures, and has me constantly looking down at it breaking eye contact completely and further reducing the volume. If I try to give a presentation without it, I get nervous and forget lines and tend to stutter adding in “umms” and forgetting whole portions entirely. Being in front of an audience makes me nervous and I tend to freeze up. In grade school I used to have a twitch and that caused problems and comments from the teachers. I also tend to skew time terribly, I can’t take into account my pace when giving the speech and tend speed up the pace as the speech goes on which causes me to fall very short of the time period. On rare occasions though all the awkward pauses put me over the time limit, but this isn’t very common.

Another thing that I have a problem with is online submittals. Coming to Baruch is the first time I’ve handed in papers over the internet. Before coming here all my assignments were handed in in-person at the set class time. Electronic submittal has some problems. Sometimes the papers are due at a certain time at a certain date and I forgot the time limit. Other times I could make a mistake and send it to the wrong source. Otherwise I have no problems with electronic submittal.

These are all of the problems that are hindering me from doing well in class. Hopefully I can combat these problems and come up with working solutions to them as time goes on.

My Name is Thomas Brock and I’m 18 years old. I have lived in Ridgewood, New York all my life. I went to High School at Brooklyn Tech. I am pretty shy and won’t really talk unless someone else talks to me first. I am slowly getting used to college life at Baruch. I’m getting used to the subtle differences from high school, like the higher work load and lower number of classes. I enjoy the long breaks between classes because it gives me time to do other things and it is nice to take a break from work. I am adjusting to life at Baruch nicely and have joined the archery club. I’m hoping to meet new people, learn new things and improve my communication and public speaking skills. I am also hoping to figure out what I would want to major in. Baruch will hopefully force me to break my habit of procrastinating, which I have had as long as I can remember. The moment when I felt the most embarrassed was when I used to play baseball. I only played because I thought my father wanted me to, but I was terrible only getting maybe 2 hits that weren’t fouls in over 3 years of playing. A moment when I felt empowered was when I used to tutor in math. It felt great to feel like you were helping someone. The student who I tutored had their math scores improve a lot. I had to stop this though, because in High School my math grades started to drop. The thing I like the most is to hang out with my friends. The thing that I hate the most is Public Speaking. I can’t deal with it and every solution I can come up with just causes more problems. I just have a hard time getting used to talking to a room full of strangers. I also dislike creative writing because it is hard to get a good idea. Free writing is also bad for me because it feels unnatural for me to just come up with ideas without thinking about them first. My fears are failure, because I don’t want to disappoint myself or my family and friends, and heights. The second fear isn’t the fear of being high up, but falling from high up. The roles that I play in my life are son, brother, friend, and student. My family and friends are the most important thing to me because they help me and guide me. I don’t really have a motto or anything like that.

Self-Portrait

I’m pretty shy and keep to myself for the most part. I have a hard time getting to know new people and I think sometimes I am aversive towards talking to them. I like to take things slowly and don’t like being rushed. Also, back when I used to play sports I was mediocre on offense but great on defense. I was even my team’s goalkeeper in soccer. So since we see each other everyday, I’ll post an image representative of myself instead of my own picture. So I chose this image of a turtle. Which has a shell which it can use to hide from things and for protection and defense from other things. It also moves slowly. So the picture is based off of the qualities I see myself having.

My name is Thomas Brock, I’m 18 years old and I hope to express “Who I think I am” in this blog post. I come from a small family and have lived in New York City my whole life. I am fairly quiet and won’t talk much unless I’m talked to first, or I have a question. I was raised as a Roman Catholic and I have more conservative political views. I think that I am a quiet, reserved person, but I am also reliable when I need to be. I’m terrible at public speaking because I get nervous talking in front of a crowd of people who I barely know. I’m pretty easy-going, from a combination of apathy and calmness. I do have some concerns about freshman year.

I am worried about meeting new people since I have trouble talking with people I’m not familiar with. I am also a bit worried about having to find out most things for myself, instead of like high school where everything was told for me, and I had people help me with things. My final concern is doing well in school. The transition from high school to college makes it seem like I will have to work a lot harder and not slack off.

I think that the Baruch College experience will differ vastly from my high school experience. I will have to get accustomed to being more independent, which will help me later on in life. No more relying on parents or other people to help me. I will have to find out important info myself, and do other stuff like choosing my schedule by myself. I will also have to adjust to the larger class sizes and faster pace. Hopefully I can do well in this new environment without much initial struggle. I have always been bad at keeping my attention on anything for a long time, but I will have to alleviate that somehow and develop better studying habits if I’m going to do well in college.

I think that my first year in college will change me a lot. It will help me to become more independent and do things on my own. Hopefully it will also help me to become a comfortable public speaker and increase my public speaking skills. I’m also hoping that it will help me to decide what major or type of career I would like to pursue. At the moment I am completely undecided as to my major and I have no idea what I want to do with myself once I finish college.