My first semester of college has been full of self-discovery.

For the first time in

my academic career, I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to discuss and use
my beliefs in my assignments. In this Honors Seminar specifically, I have had the chance
to express my beliefs openly without being judged our reprimanded for it. Over the past
few months, I have learned to be more open to opinions that are different from mine
while developing my own opinions. I think that the first semester of college has taught
me a lot about myself as well as the people I interact with on a daily basis. The artifacts
that I chose to include in this portfolio are important to me because I put a lot of time into
them, and I am proud of them.
My first artifact that I chose to include in my portfolio is the letter we wrote to our
professor after reading the Welcome Address given by Karl Paulnack. This was the first
assignment in this class, and it really made me think about my future goals and what I
wanted to do with my life. I think that by presenting this assignment as a letter made it
very personal and it made it easier for me to get all of my feelings down on paper. This
was my first reflective assignment in college, and it allowed me to connect my personal
thoughts and feelings to the speech that we listened to in class.
The first week of college was really tough for me, and completing this assignment
helped me sort out all of my feelings and realize that it was okay to not be okay. I think
that this assignment allowed me to introduce myself to my professor in an informal way,
and I hope that I gave insight into who I really am as a person. Going back and reading
this assignment again, I realized how far I have come in the past three months. I havent
exactly changed as much as I have grown and developed. The goals that I outlined in my
letter have not changed, but they have become more realistic as I have continued through

my semester. I have explored all of the ways in which I can make my dreams and goals
into realities someday.
I chose the response to Karl Paulnacks address because it really reflects the place
I was at when college started. I think making this portfolio really shows how much I have
changed or stayed the same in certain aspects of my life. This artifact is a representation
of all of my thoughts and feelings when I first came to college. I think that this
assignment was very relevant to my life at the time and I really appreciated the fact that it
applied to what was happening to me in that moment.
The second artifact I chose is my Altered Book. I chose to include this assignment
because I worked really hard on it, and it took a lot of time and effort. There were
multiple steps in the process to make the final product for this assignment. A lot of
thought went into creating each page, and it was important to me that none of them
looked to similar. This assignment gave us complete freedom to do whatever we wanted
to do what was required of us. There were not a lot of rules or guidelines to follow, and
that was new to me. Throughout high school, I had always been given a specific rubric to
follow in order to get the grade that I wanted. But the altered book gave us creative
freedom, and I liked that.
This assignment let me look at many different aspects of my life and the world in
general and think about how I saw them. From the environment, to media, to what I enjoy
to do in my free time, I think I was able to outline all of the different parts of my life. I
liked the fact hat this assignment did not require us to write out an essay or explain our
pages, but it was very open to interpretation and that made it really interesting. When we
presented our books in class, I enjoyed being able to compare and contrast what I

included in my book to what others had in theirs. Hearing about other peoples beliefs
and opinions made me think about why I have the opinions that I have, and I think it
helped show me that everyone has their own opinion and its okay if it doesnt match
mine.
I think that my altered book is something that I will keep even after college so that
I can see how I viewed the world when I started college. Im sure some of my opinions
will change, or maybe they wont, and it will be interesting to see how the ideas outlined
in my altered book are different someday. The altered book was almost a mini portfolio
of my opinions and beliefs; its like a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to know
thoughts on a topic. I definitely valued this assignment and enjoyed completing it.
My third artifact is my This I Believe essay. When this assignment was first
introduced to the class, I thought it was extremely interesting and it would be easy to
complete. My initial thought was that I would write about my faith and my strong belief
in God. But as I continued to think about what I wanted to talk about, I knew that I
wanted to be more creative and step out of the religion box. I tried to write about
traveling, then the innocence of children, but nothing seemed to sound authentic. Then I
had the idea of sticky notes, and I knew that was what I believed in.
This assignment was a very personal one, or it could have been if that the
direction you went. I enjoyed hearing about everyones different beliefs when we read
our essays in class. Everyone had a different topic and I realized how divers our class was
as we read the essays one by one. I think I value this assignment so much because it
caused me to step out of my comfort zone and explore my beliefs in a different way.

I think that this is the point in the semester when I started to see a shift in how I
approached completing assignments. Instead of taking the easy way out and writing about
my faith, I decided to expand my ideas and step out of my comfort zone. This is also the
point in the semester when I started to feel more at home here at Charlotte, and I think
my writing reflects that. Instead of focusing on how unsettled I felt here at Charlotte, I
talked about how I was making friends and memories that would last me a lifetime. This
assignment reflects a shift in how I viewed myself here at college.
For my fourth artifact, I chose to include my Six Word Memoir. This was a very
personal assignment, and that is part of the reason why I chose to include it in my
portfolio. I focused a lot on my faith in this assignment and that is really important to me.
It was really difficult to sum up my story into six words, but I think the constraint on the
number of words encouraged more creativity. It made me use caution when I chose the
words, and consider the grammar I used as well.
This was one of the more difficult assignments from this semester in my opinion
because it was so broad and the only rule was that it had to be six words. Personally, I
like to have more guidance and direction when completing assignments like this, but I do
understand why we werent given that guidance. The assignment made you think very
carefully and narrow down your worldview into just six words. I think those six words
can tell you a lot about someone.
Because we did not share these memoirs with the class, I wasnt able to learn too
much about others. I can imagine that no two peoples words were the same or even
remotely similar. Im sure some people chose to go very deep and choose very serious,
personal words, while others chose to be more sarcastic and lighthearted with the

assignment. I think that this assignment let the class reflect on who they are as a persona
and how they view the world, and then narrow their thoughts down into six words. It was
a very interesting assignment, and that is why I chose to include in in my final portfolio.
For my special selection, I chose an assignment that I completed for my
Education class. I want to become a Special Education teacher someday, and this
semester I was in an intro to education class. We did many different kinds of assignments
and projects, but the one that I enjoyed the most was when we got to go observe three
different classrooms. We were placed into elementary, middle, and high school
classrooms and were asked to observe the classes for three hours. Then we were asked to
complete two assignments in which we discussed the setup of one of the classrooms that
we visited, and we picked one student to observe and write about. These assignments are
important to me because they are applicable to what I will be doing in the future.
It was extremely interesting to be in schools and to be around children of all
different ages. Observing the different classroom let me better understand what it is like
to teach in a school these days. I had preconceived notions when I went into the
classrooms, but once I was in the different schools, I was able to really see what my
future classroom could look like someday. Completing the two different assignments for
my class caused me to think about the different aspects of having a class full of kids to
myself, and how I would want to set up my classroom. The observation of a student was
interesting to me because I was able to see how the teacher affected the students
behavior. I saw some good and not so good classrooms, and I was able to compare and
contrast how the teachers setup their classrooms and treated their students.

A lot of the work that I did in my education class was important to me because it
applies so directly to what I want to do in the future. I could have chosen many of the
different things we were assigned in that class, but the observations were very applicable
and gave me a lot of ideas on how to run my future classroom. I learned a lot about the
school system in Charlotte throughout my EDUC 101 class, and it was very relevant and
interesting to me.
This semester has been full of so many ups and downs, and this Honors Seminar
helped me sort out all of my thoughts and feelings. I think that I have gained a lot from
being in this class. I have never been given such freedom in all of my assignments, and I
had to get used to that. There was a lot of reflecting in this class, and sometimes that can
be difficult. I really liked having freedom to write about what I wanted to write about,
and I appreciated being able to express my values and beliefs freely. As you look at the
artifacts I chose, I think there is a slight shift in the way I view the world. I still center my
life around my faith in God, but I have become more open to other peoples opinions. My
transition into college was not the smoothest, but I think that I have found myself and it
will only get better from here. I am so excited to start taking more classes that pertain to
my major, and to take more opportunities toward my end goal of becoming a teacher
abroad. I am so excited to see where I end up at the end of these four years, and I hope
this portfolio reflects my first semester of freshman year accurately.