EG 4B

Baruch, in terms of work, has definitely exceeded my expectations. Presently, I have so many essay’s to write, I have no time to enjoy anything. If I put all the work aside however, Baruch has been an overall fun and exciting experience. I think the main reason why Baruch is at least some what enjoyable is because it is in the city. Different places to eat and the places to go seem endless while your there. So, in result Baruch has definitely exceeded my appetite.

My first semester at Baruch has definitely gone well so far. I’ve gotten mostly good grades from all my classes. I’m probably going to a decent starting GPA which I’m happy about. English is starting to become a struggle due to my professor being a harsh grader. I don’t really mind since I’m really not good at writing in general and I don’t really care about other people’s critique of my own writing. In just my first semester of Baruch, I realize why people think that college is difficult. Many people have some sort of idea in their head that in college you gain a lot more responsibility. However, I think professors lose a lot more responsibility which makes academic work much more difficult for the student. For example some professors have the nerve to not even give simple reminders to students about an upcoming test. Helping students is most likely in the job description in being a professor and not doing these simple things is just laziness on their behalf. If one of my particular professors was more apt in aiding students and actually cared about teaching, my semester might of been better for me and many of my fellow classmates.

One thing I would change if I could do this semester all over again is get more sleep. I am usually late for many of my early classes because I’m just feel too tired to wake up for them. If sleep wasn’t an issue for me, I believe my first semester of Baruch would of been better. With more sleep, I would be more lively and able to pay attention during class.

I don’t think I’ve changed to greatly because of college. I’m still basically the same kind of person. I always do my work at the last minute and accomplish it. I still love all the things I used to love and look forward to everyday. A few things that have changed are my daily lunch and my Facebook friend count increased.

My first semester at Baruch is finally, and thankfully, coming to a close. There is one month till the end to be exact, and I couldn’t be happier. The awkwardness of being in a new school is slowly but surely beginning to fade, and my time management skills are sharpening by the day. However, I would be lying if I said Baruch has held up to my expectations. I naively hoped that college would be as great as it seems on television, only to be greatly disappointed. I suppose the only person to blame is myself. It’s my fault I didn’t research other schools, and it’s my fault that I didn’t go away for college. I’m still just as confused as I was a few months ago, especially now that registration for the next semester is coming around.

Despite my discontentedness at school, I do believe that my first semester of college is going fairly well, grade wise that is. I’m doing above average in most of my classes, all of them, as a matter of fact except for Calculus. Just as I had predicted, calculus has turned out to be a problem area, despite the fact that I get tutored for three to four hours at a time. Math has never been a favorite subject of mine, yet somehow I still managed to understand it and get A’s. However, Calculus is different. No matter how hard I try, or how hard I study, I just can’t seem to get it.

If I could do my first semester over, would I do it differently? Though I think this question is silly, because I don’t believe there’s any use in contemplating the past and the mistakes you have made, even if I could, I don’t believe that I would do anything differently in my first semester. Academically, I am doing all that I can, and as I said, except for calculus, I’m not worried. In addition, even though I’ve deemed it impossible to make friends if you’re not in a Learning Community class, I don’t regret transferring my credits- the reason I was taken out of an LC. After this semester I’ll be already considered a sophomore, which means I’m a step closer to graduating college and starting my life. The only thing I would do differently, is take Music instead of Theatre, because it’s a prerequisite for my major-Management of Music Enterprises. Music would have fulfilled both my Fine and Performing Arts requirement, and my prerequisite requirement.

As we approach the closing of the semester, and I reflect back on who I was when this all first started, I can’t say I’ve really changed too much. Perhaps I am a bit more self motivated, goal oriented, independent, and organized, but not enough that I can see the difference. Maybe one semester just isn’t a long enough period of time to completely change one’s self. Either way, whether I change or not after I come out of Baruch, I don’t believe it’ll be a result of going through college, just a side-effect of growing up.

Overall, I am really loving it at Baruch. I love the buildings and the environment. I get along well with the people here and everyone always seems ready to help freshmen. My experience at Baruch has exceeded my expectations for the college in various ways. For one, I feel like I am a part of a community because I am  a member of a business club called Ascend. Also, I try to take advantage of everything the campus has to offer so I use the Writing Center and gym often. I also enjoy my classes and feel like I am doing well in them. One thing  I probably still have to work on is time management and prioritizing my assignments.

If I could do something differently during my first semester, I would simply be more active and organized. I want to be active and engaging with the Baruch campus while organized so that still take care of important things first.

Since being a freshman at Baruch, I have developed into a more eager to learn person. In high school, I felt more reserved and focused on school only, but that’s changed now. Now, I am more active in the community and I try to attend many events to learn as much as I can. I realized that it is very important to share and create great connections in college, It is almost as important as doing well in studies itself. I feel more inspired to learn since there are a lot more opportunities in college than there are in high school. Overall, I have changed into a more outgoing person.

My experience at Baruch College has lived up pretty much as I expected it upon entering the school. I knew traveling to school in Manhattan everyday would be very different from the 5 minute walk that took me to my high school. I knew the work would be much more difficult than I had experienced throughout high school and I was correct. I expected college to be a bunch of huge lecture classes were there would be more than 100 people. It turned out that most of my classes actually had fewer than 30 people in it.

In all honesty my first semester at Baruch College went exactly as my senior year of high school ended, I was lazy and unmotivated. I did alright in all of my classes but absolutely nowhere near my full potential. But on the other hand I did make a few friends along with the friends I had from high school. I saw the way college and high school are different and that has helped me.

Obviously I can say If I could do this semester all over again I would study very hard and get great grades but I’m not a very motivated student and that just wouldn’t be the truth. If I could do it all over again I would honestly not come to Baruch College. I don’t really dislike the school too much but I’m not very happy with my decision.

I haven’t changed much since I started at Baruch College, I’m still a very lazy student who still manages good grades but could do better. I’m in the city a lot more which is fun but it’s not worth almost 2 hours of commute everyday to go to school in my opinion.

A) I have to admit, Baruch has not lived up to my expectations. I dont dread my decision of coming here however. I’ve always enjoyed the competitivness and school in general. There are many ways for you to get help in almost any type of situation you are in. It takes some getting used to with the new learning style but it’s one that I believe everyone has to cope with.I’m trying to complain though, I’m only a freshman and my college “career” just started. I think its too quick to judge Baruch already.

B) I think so far, my first semester at Baruch has been okay. It hasn’t been the best and it hasn’t been the worst ever. College is about sacrafices and working really hard. It’s just something I had to get used to. I wish I had made that choice sooner. There are mistakes that I’ve made that I can’t take back. They are just some that I have to learn and live from.

C) If I could go back and time and do my first semester all over again I would. I like all of my classes, and the time frame in my schedule wasn’t bad. I just wish that I studied more and did not procrastinate. I would’ve probably not have to drop a class and been gettin A’s in everything. Sadly, not everything always works like that. But those are the two major things that I would change if I had the chance to do my first semester all over again.

D) I don’t think that I’ve changed drastically since attending Baruch. I am more prone to the city life-style. I’m also aware of the values of money. As quick as you can get it, is not half as quick as it goes. In the beginnging I hateded my breaks. But after a while, I realized how important they really are. If you happen to forget to do a homework assignment or study you can use those breaks to help you out. Since I also started Baruch I continued with my ultimate bad habit of procastination. It wasn’t until I bombed the monologue that I had to do in FRO, that I realized how embarrassing and stupid it is to not be prepared.

I believe that I am deprived from self-motivation. Not many things awe me, therefore I become bored very easily. I believe that I lost my motivation between the ages of 13-15. Nothing in my life had to be worked for. I did not really have to work towards anything.  Or maybe it was because I lost something dear to me and I thought nothing in life matters anymore?
What hinders me? Is it my lack of motivation or is it my abundance of discouragement?
What hinders me? I would like to gain a sense of knowledge or memory in everything that I do.. Is that being too selfish? I know that somewhere deep DEEP inside me I truly desire to have an excessive amount of interest in something. I guess I lack that also.
What hinders me? Maybe it’s because I always look for something more… I am never fully satisfied.
What hinders me? Is it because I like spending my time doing simple things and I never look at the bigger picture?
I want to create a painting on a large canvass but I lack the pastels and correct strokes to create a masterpiece.
I want to have a drive in my heart that allows me to question and experience things. But my drive runs out of gas after only a few miles.
What hinders me? Maybe it’s because I  was never allowed to see the rainbow after the rain storm. So I haven’t experienced a miracle yet.
What hinders me?
I have too much questions about the future. What if I do this and that happens? Would it still be worth it? What if I try this and something bad happens? Would I regret it?
What if I am happy and I lose it? I am afraid of pain and failure.
A lot of my thoughts stops me from continuing. But I am slowly realizing that I shouldn’t be scared to take chances. Life is only so beautiful if you are willing to put effort into it.
You can only get good grades if you actually take your time and study the subject. Nothing magically comes to you if you are just sitting in a room and waiting. There are things in life that one can wait for but one also needs to be active in achieving that goal.
What hinders me? It’s the determination and motivation that I need find again. Or acquire again.
What hinders me? I think I’m just waiting for the street lights to turn from red to green.

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.

Daniel Shum

There are a lot of things that hinder me. It is the fact that I think I can finish everything but I can’t. Most of the time I think too highly of myself and do not complete the work that I need to do. I am a huge procrastinator and I think it is one of my greatest flaws. While I do work the only thing that pops into my head is facebook and it gets really distracting when I log on. I tried deactivating it but it is like a drug a habit that I can not cure. Procrastination has been with me since I was little as a child I would always put my chores off to the last minute and I would always get in trouble for not doing them. The tasks that are handed to me are truthfully not hard but I have an attention spam of a baby I look at one thing and I would be distracted. I mean a paper is a paper, studying for a test is studying for a test and it all isn’t very hard. However I just can not bring my self to being able to do the work. I sit at the computer for hours telling myself that after this game or after I eat this or after I sleep I will do the work but it never happens till the last minute. This is horrible because I end up doing bad work that gets bad grades and end up falling behind in class.

The change in grades also got to me I am not used to the hours of college. During my middle school and high school years class ended earlier and I didn’t have to take many. Most of my school days ended at 12 and I would go the park and enjoy my time. The work load was also less and I didn’t have to do as much as I have to do now. The big change in the amount of work and the change in the time of the classes really got to me. College for me starts roughly around 9 everyday and ends at about 4 everyday for me. If I were to be at a club, I wouldn’t have anytime to do work. I am also a very busy person and I work a lot with 3 different jobs. I have a lot of bills to pay because I do in fact live by myself and pay for my own college. I rent my own apartment having to pay all my billings that include gas, internet, electricity, water, heating and television. There is a lot to do and most of the time I don’t have time to do the work in the time I have. Moreover when I do have the time to relax I do want to relax and use my down time for things that are rather fun. I like to go out play sports or just chill and sit and watch a movie. I don’t like college much with the work because I find that as a business major most jobs are landed by having a huge network and networking is basically what we need. In my opinion most skill that we have are already given at birth and we all know if one is capable enough to be successful in the future. What also hinders me is that class sometimes is so boring in certain classes and it is amazing hard to pay attention. At time during class I doze off into another world and eventually fall asleep.

Time is a huge problem especially when the sun is out. When the sun is out I expect myself to be out playing instead of being inside doing work. When it is dark outside I like to be sleeping so my mentality is wrong. I do not like doing most of the work and when something gets too complicated I like to leave it for another time to do. Most of the time I hate to do work and would much rather do something else. These are the things that hinder me and make me a much more lazy person. I need a lot of sleep so I sleep around 12 everyday so I don’t have much time to do work. Also since I live by myself I need to cook and clean and stuff so I can’t do a lot of things in the time I have. Each day has only 24 hours what I can I do it isn’t like I can make there more hours in a day and make myself not tired.

I guess I’m just lazy and rather have fun then to do work. I’m an hedonistic person. I want instant gratification in whatever I do and I just haven’t made that leap to thinking about the future. Well I mean sure I think about it like what I’m am going to do for the rest of my life and how I will achieve it. I think everyone thinks about these things every now and then but I just haven’t connected the dots.

I get my stimulus from playing handball when it isn’t too cold or I go play pool with my best friend. Those give me my instant gratification. The feeling of doing that awesome kill in handball  or making a hard cut shot into a pocket in pool. Those things give me motivation because I get that boost of adrenaline.  Now that its getting colder I’m going back to video games. I’ve been an avid gamer for years and I’m good at what I do which is first person shooter. I have many friends that are good and fun to be with in a game and its just hard to say no to them when they ask me to join their game. It feels good to be good at something and to be with friends.

Believe it or not I also enjoy learning. I’m loving my anthropology and math classes. But the way I learn also feeds my bad habits. People learn differently and I learn by listening and watching what the teacher does and says. I rarely if ever copy notes and if I do Ill probably get only a little more then half of what I would get from just sitting there quietly and paying attention. Because of that, writing suffered dramatically. I never wrote anything and my grammar was always horrendous. Learning the rules of how to write properly just confused me even more so I never bothered. But homework was never really like “watch this youtube video and we will discuss it in class”. I’d do that H.W. every day and learn something from it if it was but sadly it never happened that way.

I realized I should conform to how things work in an institute like Baruch but I never felt the need to in High school so I never did. Paying attention in class and getting high grades in test meant little to no work at home which gave me the freedom to do whatever. Having that much freedom is intoxicating to say the least. It’s hard to let go a way of life you lived for most of your life.

Sometimes things just happen to slowly. Handball when you play a good game, the ball moves fast and my reaction time gets better and faster. Picking up a fast kill meant reacting to it before it hits the wall and getting into position. The pace of the game makes me love it. This carries over to games. There is games like RPG (Role Playing Games) that just bore the hell out of me. Everything is slow and the build up is slow. Shooting games gives me fast pace feeling when my reaction to seeing the enemy is everything. In school, everything is slow. So far I had one exam in math class. I haven’t paid attention nor did any H.W. for it for a good couple of weeks so obviously I’m behind. But all I did was skim through the notes for a good hour and paid attention the class before the exam to catch up and I got an 80 on the test. I came from a school where 80 was good enough and the way I see it, I probably didn’t need to skim through my notes for that hour if I paid attention in every class but one class was 100 minutes. Things just don’t move fast enough for me to care. Not saying I’m a prodigy and I will get things instantly and of course this pace is still faster then the pace in my high school.

More or less to rap it up, I’m a hedonist. I need my instant gratification so I have the motivation to continue. If I don’t get it, I lose motivation and quit before I even start. I’d think about doing something and calculate when I will receive my reward. I realize the reward is bigger and much more valuable then having an adrenaline rush in sports or games but right now, I just don’t feel it.