This experience throughout this class has been nothing but a roller coaster.

From time
management to making sure I am turning in pristine work to helping out other classmates. This
class might have taken a lot of hard work, but it has only helped me move forward in a positive
way. Before this class, I had done one or two research essays, but they were never performed
to this extent. I only had to research a specific topic and write five paragraphs on that topic
explaining what it was to a person that had no idea about it. In my opinion, the analytical
research essay was not just one essay. It was more of an entire project of building blocks that
lead up to a conclusion. That final analytical research essay was that conclusion. It is the thing
that sums up everything that I have been working for this entire semester, and it proves that
kind of work that I have the ability of putting out. It takes more persistence in getting to the point
of writing that final essay than it did to write it. This is because without all of the research that I
had done and interpreting of the meaning of articles and what they mean to me, there would be
no final essay to write. There would just be an idea that I came up with, and I would only be
describing my ideas without having concrete proof to back them up. Due to all of this planning
and hard work, this class really caused me to grow personally as a student and as a person.
To be frank, this semester was a struggle for me. Growing up, I have never been the
person that has loved to write or do things that I am not one hundred percent interested in. This
caused me to struggle a little bit throughout the class. Luckily, when we were finding out about
the class, I realized that we were actually choosing our own topics. This helped me a lot
because I was able to actually research and investigate something I am actually interested in
and enjoy learning about on a daily basis. On the other hand, I was still having to do something
that I personally do not enjoy, writing. I know that this is something that a lot of people struggle
with when going through school and we just have to learn to tough it out, but when I started
writing my essays and diving into each assignment, I realized it was not as hard as I thought it
would be. This is because of the guidance that our teacher has provided us. For each and
every assignment, we are given a rubric or a set of questions that we have to make sure we
follow so that we could get full points. We were also given a word count for each thing we
turned in. Personally, that word count was something that I did not really have to worry about.
This is because if you were to answer every question or mark off every box in the rubric, you
would easily surpass the minimum number of words needed. Having this structure to help guide
my writings or my responses really helped me in performing at my personal best.
While taking this class, I also found out some of the good things about myself. Normally,
I am a very stubborn person that does not like to ask for help no matter what. I would rather get
something wrong a couple times before backing down and going to someone to help me fix the
problem. In this class, this kind of persistence really helped me when researching my
secondary sources. The topic that I was writing about did not have a lot of published peer
reviewed articles. This made it difficult in trying to find any kind of article to use to compare my
primary sources to, but I never gave up, and even though it took me a couple of hours to finally
find articles that could work for my research, I achieved what I set out to do. On the other hand,
for maybe the first time, rather than struggling to figure out a problem, that could be easily
solved with a little help, I decided to email my teacher with any issues I was having. This made
life so much easier because I did not sit there staring at my computer endlessly. This is a class
that has truly caused me to grow in all ways.
 Two of the course outcome that we have achieved throughout the semester was to read
scholarly texts and understand what they are saying and we will find information from those
scholarly texts to use in our research. We did this multiple times throughout the semester. To
achieve the first part of reading and understanding the scholarly texts, we read articles from
Greene, Jenkins, and Grant-Davie and summarized them. By doing this, we proved our
understanding of the information. We also found scholarly texts to use in our final analytic
essay. Those three articles we used, we had to find on our own and then tie them back to our
primary sources. This again proves our understanding of the information. This is yet again a
new thing to me going into this course.
In creating this ePortfolio, I chose to use the theme phrase “Summary of Humans.” This
is because every assignment we did we had to summarize something. This was from an article,
like the three stated above, to a website to how a community acts. Those assignments also
describe human nature, how humans make decisions, or even just specific human
characteristics. The assignments that I chose to incorporate cover these aspects the most, and
it is not hard to figure out those links. The layout of the ePortfolio itself, is simple because that
makes it easier to navigate, but it still catches the eye because of the color in the images in the
header of every page. The pictures that I chose represents the research that I did throughout
the semester because that is what all those smaller assignments worked up to. If it were not for
those essays, there would not be as much correlation between those smaller assignments and
we would not have met any of the course outcomes. In the end, all of this has just worked to
help me grow as a student and expand my knowledge by forcing me to go through new
experiences and find similarities in things I would have never thought to look for before.