FRO13 LC06

Zi Lee

Freshman Seminar

Professor Happonen

11-29-13

Although I wasn’t paying much attention to the enrichment workshop, I get the overall idea of what it is about. The speaker basically talked about volunteering and happiness and asked if there was a correlation between the two. Despite the fact that I didn’t watch the film, I can say happiness is the aftermath of volunteering. I started volunteering in junior year of high school at New York Hospital of Queens. At first, I did it because my college advisor said that having some community service records look good on my high school transcript. After the very first day of volunteering, I found out that I really liked helping patients. The gratitude shown on their faces really made my hard work paid off. Although it’s cumbersome to take 4 hours of your homework time to volunteer, all I can say I really enjoyed the experience and hope to return there one day. Another instance is the New York Care Project I signed up for last month. I was assigned to organize clothes at a factory in a deep part of Queens. Even though I didn’t see the poor people receiving the clothes I organized, I can already imagine their excitement and joyfulness to finally have meticulous clothes to wear. At last, I really enjoy doing community services on my free time and it has been one hell of an experience for me. There are a lot of people in need out there and we can ALL make a difference!

My first semester in Baruch has been a fiasco. I felt really confident coming into college thinking that I will ace every course. Unfortunately, it was completely opposite from what I have expected. I was so adapt to my ways of dealing with schoolwork in high school which have dramatized my GPA for this semester. Time management and procrastination is not my bread and butter. The worst part of this semester is my math professor and the class in general. How are you going to put a student who has never taken Calculus in his life with students who took Calculus but got less than a 4 on the AP test? It such an enigma to me why this has already happened and I only been here for 2 months. My math professor is another conflict. He likes to complicate things and never explain the rudimentary of Calculus. Second, I finally realized English is a very unfair course. I always thought that if one spends time and efforts on one’s paper, then one will definitely get a well-deserved grade. Unfortunately, that theory is proven false in my first semester. In my class, I see people who just have better writing skills than me which give them an upper advantage over me in obtaining a good grade. They have spent less efforts and time, but yet still a higher grade than me. I must submit to the fact “Life isn’t fair” and hard work DOES NOT pay off. Finally, I’m going to reiterate the fact that my first semester is horrendous and hopefully I can prevent this problem in my upcoming years in Baruch with my diligence and determination.