Consideration & Consistency
This week in my EMC journey has been one with quite a lot of thought put into it.
At the beginning of the week, I was posed with a question by Mr. Bott: ‘do you still want to do this?’ To be quite honest, I was taken back a little. I can’t put into words what I felt at that moment, but it put me into a lot of thought. I don’t think I’ve ever doubted myself in my academic decisions. Besides those questions on a test where I have no clue what answer to choose or that short answer question where I try to concoct some answer that would give me at least a fraction of a point, I never doubted the courses I enrolled in. I have always been the ambitious one; the one ready to pick up a tough workload with pleasure. So, nevertheless dropping out of a class wouldn’t cross my mind (well besides the times where I would be up at 3 am studying or doing homework, yelling at myself for having to do so much work at the expense of sleep; but those were never serious, just a tired teenager who just needed to go to bed).
The question kept lingering through my mind for the rest of the day. I went into the help desk room, slouched into the chair and seriously reevaluated myself. As I was worked through the topic, I brought up one of the most pivotal questions: what are you doing this for? Well, I do know what I’m doing this for.
As I said, I have never been the one to back out. My commitments are my commitments and these commitments are solely based upon what I want to do. The liberation I feel as a student when it comes to EMC is immense, I have never felt so free to do what I want to as a student. Now, I don’t want to reiterate why I love EMC (it’s in an earlier journal) because that isn’t even the main point of this journal. However, I just want to get my point across: I take EMC because it makes me feel like a liberated student, I do it because it makes me happy.
I walked into to the library today with my decision made and discussed it with Mr. Bott. While he was happy that I was still committed, he emphasized the importance of consistency. This became my goal for this next month.
Consistency is essential for this course as it ensures that an exceptional end product is produced. I have to admit, I haven’t been consistent. First and foremost, my journals aren’t regular. This was also a struggle I had last year, my writing, when it was done, was beneficial but it was so time consuming that I didn’t do it as often as I should have. Going forward, it’s important that I do more writing especially on what I’m reading. Being able to dissect, summarize and analyze writing is an essential skill in a literature laden course. In doing so, I can better keep track of what I’m doing as far as advancing my paper but also start bridging concepts and forming my own ideas.
