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The college experience

My idea of college is an educational institution providing higher education whilst also being a transition from an environment where a student is living at home and is dependant on their parents to where they are mostly independent. I feel that it would be a huge change from the standard high-school environment with both the workload and the extra-curricular activities that you are presented with as well as making time for a social life and meeting new people from all over the country and the world. Going to college I am hoping that I will be able to achieve good grades and pursue my intended major whilst taking part in extracurricular activities, joining new clubs, and meeting new people.

Growing up in England, going to college in the United States had always been something that I had wanted to do from a young age. Many things made me want to do this from wanting a change in the environment in which I was living in, the opportunities present in the USA and the so called ‘college experience’ which I had heard so much about. Hearing from friends and family in the United States I could tell that college was going to be a time where I would be able to meet lots of new people, develop connections, have fun as well as having to push myself to the hardest in the academic field. Rutgers university seemed to be a good fit for me because not only was I close to my family but from what research I had done, I learned that it was both a place with good academics, but also had a lot of extracurricular activities such as different clubs and societies as well as offering many opportunities such as internships. I also feel that the contacts you would make from college would also make a big impact throughout a person’s life from many different perspectives connecting to Nathans article.

Soon after arriving in the States, college at first seemed very daunting. This was since I had moved into a very happening busy place in a country in which I was not even familiar with. Not only this, but the college was also huge and had multiple campuses with a vast range of activities going on. Even though being in this environment created a sense of personal fear at the start, I saw this as an opportunity to take the most of this transition and find out about all the events and activities going on around the college and trying to speak to as many new people as possible. The campus allowed me to also make a lot of connections since there were people from all different year groups, backgrounds and different majors.

Moving into college I had a great degree of freedom which was good but also created many challenges It allowed me to make more decisions for myself and it made sure I kept myself busy and organised. However, this freedom also created multiple challenges for me such that I had to keep a count off how much I was spending and making sure that I was not going over my budget as well as making sure that I was balancing my academic work with my social life. I felt that also having close family nearby allowed me to have my personal freedom, but also if an emergency occurred or if I needed any sort of help, I was not alone. Having this much freedom also taught me to become a lot more responsible of my actions.

Having the balance of freedom, but also having family near me showed college to be a sort of liminal experience. A sort of transition that is the bridge between childhood and adulthood. Spending a few days at college before classes had started, I met a lot of new people who were from very different backgrounds to myself. A lot of whom were from New Jersey to students that were from many different countries such as Brazil and India. All of these students coming together at college and spending time together having fun and getting to know each other really created that ‘college experience atmosphere’. This was because all these students were like myself in the sense that this was their first time being properly independent staying away from their family and having to do all their work both domestic and academic without the help of their family and I found out that these people were also facing similar day to day challenges which I was facing.

Speaking to students in older years also gave me good advice on how to balance academic work with domestic work and being organised whilst also having a social life to make the most of the ‘college experience’. Once classes had started, I had found making sure all that all my assignments were handed in by the due date was a challenge that not only myself but many of my other peers had also faced. To get over this challenge we set designated times in the day in which we would all meet together and finish our assignments so that we would not hand in late work but would also have time to do other activities such as go out with friends, join clubs and societies and take part in the many activities that we were presented with. Having this study group to get work done on time helped me develop positive relationships with these students and enabled me to feel part of a community and we started joining different clubs and societies together.

Being a few weeks into college my idea of ‘the college experience’ has definitely changed. This is since growing up I never thought about the day-to-day challenges which I would face at college such as handing in work on time and making sure all the domestic work was done as well as making sure that I had kept myself organised. I feel however, that my current idea of the ‘college experience’ will change throughout the year as I meet new people and try new activities and find out many more ways in which I can overcome the challenges which I would be faced with throughout college.

Eap Project 2

The multicultural upbringing of a person can help them construct their identity as a person. From the reading we can see how the different upbringings of the writers of their native culture and the culture of the country of their residence has shaped their identity. The multicultural upbring of a person from the texts, ‘Exiting Outsie’ by Maya Lin and ‘My Hyphenated Identity’ by Jhumpa Lahiri. These two texts relate to the idea of liminality in the sense that the transition period of understanding their native culture better has helped to change their previous views and has helped to develop their identity and allowed them to follow their culture of the country of their residence as well as being able to uphold their native cultures.

Multicultural identity has been something that many people from multiple different cultures have. Different people tend to have different views of their multicultural identity and how they can embrace it and their view often tends to evolve as they get older. With reference to the text ‘Exiting Outside’ by Maya Lin and ‘My Hyphenated Identity’ by Jhumpa Lahiri.  We can see how the multicultural identity of both characters has evolved over the years. From the text by Lahiri, the quotation, ‘As an adult I accept that a bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing’ shows how Lahiri’s relationship to the term ‘Indian-American’ has changed over the years. This quotation shows how her view of being an ‘Indian-American’ has changed in a positive way as she has grown older. This is because when she was younger, she was often embarrassed by her Bengali culture, but now she has now embraced it and is appreciating her culture a lot more. I feel that this is a temporary change for her since she is now understanding the benefits of being an ‘Indian-American’ and how it is not something to be embarrassed about. From the text by Maya Lin, ‘ I was naïve about my racial identity. Race didn’t matter, and I did not perceive the difference until I had won my very first competition to design the Vietnam Veteran’s memorial.’ This quotation shows how for Maya Lin her Asian identity was not something that she was at all concerned about or notice to until she started winning award due to her work relating to her identity. This also changed how she perceived her identity in the sense that it made her more interested in her multicultural identity and started to embrace it more.

We can see how the influence of family has been different for both the characters, Maya Lin and Jhumpa Lahiri has led to the liminality stage of developing a multicultural background of both cultures. For Jumpa Lahiri it would be her ‘Indian-American’ identity, and for Maya Lin it would be her ‘Asian-American’ identity. From the text by Lahiri, the quotation ‘While I am American by the virtue that I was raised in this country, I am Indian thanks to the efforts of two individuals.’ This shows how her influence with her family figures into her identity as an ‘Indian-American’. This is because she feels that it is not her genetic composition that is making her ‘Indian-American’, but it is the cultures and values that she has been brought up with which is having that influence on her. For Maya Lin, we can see how her families background on Asian artwork and architecture has had an influence on her identity. From the quotation, ‘Along with my grandfather’s collection of Chinese pottery which my father grew up with, and how this had a direct influence on my father’s work’ and ‘ just as he had been influenced by the arts and crafts of his environment, so was I.’ These quotations show how the parental influence of her father has helped to shape Maya Lin’s identity of her passion of the arts and crafts relating to her Asian heritage.

In conclusion, we can see how relating to both writers Maya Lin and Jhumpa Lahiri, their formation of their Asian identity has occurred through their families influence on how their values and cultures have impacted their ways of lives and how their culture has had an influence on their influence on their hobbies as well as their passions which has helped to form their multicultural identity. We can also see how the multicultural identities of these characters has evolved over the years from where they have been ashamed or taken no notice of their heritage to embracing it and allowing it to help form their identity.

EAP Project 3

My chosen discipline for this project is business. Three texts that I have chosen that relate to this discipline are: How the SoftBank is posting profits of more than $21 billion by the Wall Street Journal, A Ted Talk on The Power of Business and a text by the Harvard Business Review on how different sellers are building their own platforms. My first text is from The Wall Street Journal written by Megumi Fujikawa and Eliot Brown, and it is about how the SoftBank is posting profits of more than $21 billion, it is an example of expert discourse in the disciplinary field of business. The second text that I have chosen is a Ted Talk on the Power of Business by Ashley M Grice, it is an example of how an expert is speaking to non-experts on the disciplinary field of business. The third text that I have chosen is from the Harvard Business Review on how different sellers are building their own platforms by Julian R.K Wichmann. This text is also an example of an expert discourse in the disciplinary field of business. The main finding of this project is to see how the different language used by each text has an effect on the reader/audience of the text and how it can influence the what type of reader the text is for.

There is a difference between the first two texts that I have chosen, the first one being an example of an expert discourse in a disciplinary field from a business journal, and the second being an example of how an expert in the disciplinary field speaks to a general audience in the form of a motivational talk. We can see how there is a difference in the language used between both texts. The first text for example being from the Wall Street Journal explains what is happening in the business world with the Softbank posting profits of more than $21 billion after selling Alibaba shares. It does this by stating facts with statistics, using formal language, and explaining how this is leading to the profits being made. A reader who is not an expert in this disciplinary field may not thoroughly understand this or may not be fully interested in this text. The second text however, which is a Ted Talk by Ashley M Grice on the Power of Business uses very different language compared to the first text. This is because this Ted Talk is narrated in a more informal way talking in first person compared to the first text which is written in the third person stating statistics and it talks about the actual events that took place in the speaker’s life and how it conveys the power of business to show the purpose of a company and different leadership strategies which a company could use. This use of narrative informal language would help an audience that is not an expert in business to be much more engaged in the talk and also help to understand it better.

The third text which I have chosen is from the Harvard Business Review and it is about building your own platform for selling goods and services. This text explains how some sellers have succeeded in the selling of goods and services and how some have failed and the strategies and platforms that successful sellers have used. This is shown by quotations such as ‘Hugo Boss and Dyson have successfully created their own stores to capture the trade of their loyalists,’ and ‘single-brand stores tend not to be a good way to expand the customer base.’  The language used in this text is formal, but at the same time it engages readers who are both experts and non-experts in this disciplinary field. This is because it is not like the first text which goes straight into facts and statistics which a reader who is not an expert in the field might have very minimal interest in, but at the same time it is not explained in a narrative way. The structure of this text also helps to engage the reader since it first talks about the companies that have been successful, then which ones have been unsuccessful, the reason why some have succeeded and how some have failed and then talks about the threats to selling online.

In conclusion, the different types of language used in. the different texts helps to convey what is being said in the disciplinary field to different audiences. The first texts engaging audiences who are experts, the second texts engaging non-experts but experts may also take interest, and the third text engaging both audiences of experts and non-experts.