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Who am I, and where am I going? It is a constant frustration that I tend to go to sleep with every night. Since I was little, I’ve pushed myself to achieve the most I can with the resources I have, but although this seems like a thing I should be proud of, it has had some negative effects on my life as well. This constant need for perfectionism has shaped me into a very centered person with a well structured life plan, but what happens when life brings unexpected circumstances into my life that I had not contemplated? What happens when things don't go as planned? Stress and frustration consume me, and that was not an exception this first year of college.

College is an experience no one understands until they live it. At the beginning, I thought, “I have just a few classes, and I’ll have a lot of time.” Also, I said the common phrase we all tend to say at the start of a new year, “I’ll study a little bit every day, so that way I will always be prepared.” (Spoiler: I never studied if it wasn’t for a test.) The need for perfection combined with the combination of adapting to a new learning system, a new place to live, new people living with me, a new area, new friends, and new information overwhelmed me at some point. I had the need to do everything, but I was feeling like I was really doing nothing. I wanted to get involved, but I always felt that it wasn’t enough. A constant fight between my social life and my academic life, combined with my familiar life, work, and the “me time” I needed, seemed nearly impossible to achieve, and it is something I talked about in my Papelito 9. Because I wanted to do everything, I was doing it without thought, to the point where I was not even enjoying the process. My lifestyle and routine got ruined; I barely ate because of lack of time; sleeping for me was nonexistent; and my school work? Especially my writing, which I tend to struggle with, was affected, as I mention in my Papelito 3.

I’ve always liked to write, but I tend to write my thoughts and ideas, not necessarily papers people are going to read. I am of the idea that when you have a lot on your mind, writing it down helps you get it out and free your mind from those worries and stress, but this time, writing it down wasn’t going to help.

After this, I realized how much all aspects of my life were affected, and I understood that I needed to set priorities. What was my main priority? School, and yes, there should always be balance, but since doing well in school gives me mental peace, I was taking care of my future and my mental health all together. The laptop I had was not working well, so my iPad was my salvation. As I mentioned in Papelito 5, my iPad helped me stay organized and keep all my work in a single workspace. Finding alternate solutions, along with having self comprehension about how it is okay to not do everything and be at everything, and also understanding  that what I’m doing is enough (as long as I am enjoying it), switched my mindset. After I understood that, I’ve been able to enjoy all aspects of my life in a great way, and my writing assignments have improved in quality. Now I don’t see writing as an exhausting and time consuming thing to do, but as a way of expressing my thoughts. By having this mindset, my writing experience in the future will be more organic and easy because I now understand that if you give proper time to assignments and simply the things you do in your life and you find joy in doing them even though they are school work or things you didn't want to do, you suffer less and do them with a better quality, which will take me to the places I want to get to in the future. Remember: “El flojo trabaja doble.”

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Developing a sense of belonging (and examine [dis]belonging), to build  purpose in our writing lives

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Developing a sense of belonging (and examine [dis]belonging), to build  purpose in our writing lives

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Sometimes people are excluded and marginalized unconsciously by society. Society has a tendency to follow what everyone is doing so sometimes when they see someone different, society gets a big shock. And by taking this course I realized people are not only marginalized by what we are all usually more familiar with, being religion, race, ethnicity, identity, gender; but it goes way further. People are also excluded because of having revolutionary ideas, different ideologies, different tastes, and honestly only by being different to the rest. We should raise our voices to cover those differences and advocate for us, society, to create conscience about how we are not all the same, but that is okay, and that is what makes the world rich. Rich in ideologies, cultures, languages, everything. In my papelito 5, I talk about how at the beginning I hated Tucson, because I was still attached to my old life; but now that I started understanding that my old life no longer exists I created a sense of disbelonging there and a sense of belonging to this new reality I’m living. By understanding and identifying my sense of belonging or disbelonging to build a purpose I will be able to advocate for important changes, give a voice to those who lack of it.

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This assignment was our assignment of Unit 2 where we reflected on our writing experience through the unit. We provided revisions as well as a reflection where we were encouraged to think back and reflect on how we grew as writers, my response was the following: “I noticed that by reading and sharing my work with others I was able to perfect my work. It is easy to stay with your own idea without expanding the comprehension of the assignment towards others but when you share, get feedback and see others work your personal work development gets better too and allows you to do a more indepth submission. I like this dynamic of collaborative writing and hope to be able to keep doing it for future assignments and if not I’ll try and find people who can review my work and give me an external opinion for it. “ By reflecting on our writing experience we are able to grow as writers since we identify what works and what doesn't. I believe this is the most important goal of the course since it allows us to develop a sense of identity in our writing which will form my writing style for my future.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Richard A. Harvill Bldg, Tucson, AZ 85721, EE. UU.

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The purpose of this assignment was to provide feedback to our peers as well as receive feedback from them to revise our final project and at the end turn in a more comprehensible and complete final draft. When we provide comments and read our peer’s work we are able not only to provide them with feedback that they can’t see but learn from how they have written and revise our own work as well. At the end of the assignment we did a collection of global and local errors we corrected for our final draft:

“Error: On a website called Littsburgh they shared a quote from a reader that said: “A must-read for anyone who thinks ‘build a wall’ is the answer to anything” (Esquire).

Fixed: On a Littsburgh webpage regarding literary arts, an interview with the author mentions the book as they share a quote from a reader that said: “[a]A must-read for anyone who thinks ‘build a wall’ is the answer to anything” (“Interview: Francisco Cantú”Esquire).

Why: My in text quotation was wrongly formatted. By adding a more direct in text quotation of the article I used it is easier for the reader to find it in the works cited page.”

This activity allows us to identify our most common errors and be more aware of them for future writings. By practicing revision and collaborative writing, I will be able to identify my common errors faster and also detach from my own work. Sometimes writers find it hard to accept their writing work and seeing with another vision is important since those feedbacks are the ones which will truly improve our writing.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Av. Ruiz Cortinez 9, Buenos Aires Oeste, 84010 Nogales, Son., México

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This assignment was our final project for Unit 1. In this project we provided argumentation  comparing and contrasting 3 different sources that talked about borderlands. This essay was required to be written in academic writing and sourcing citation, although since we were giving our opinion and talking about how we perceived these different sources to provide our own interpretation of what borderlands is, we were able to use first person, which broke the academic essay conventions. An example is where I included this as a part of my argumentation in an academic essay: “With all these different contexts we can state how different they all are from each other but at the same time they all have some kind of root with being binational.” By breaking this specific convention I was allowed to break it on purpose because of how familiar I had become with the different specific conventions academic writing brought including citations, be them in text or in the works cited page. This practice will allow my writing to transcend in the future since I won’t be closed to rigid rules, but will be able to properly identify them and decide to break them if I believe that would add to my value as writer and even value to my own paper and idea.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Broadway/Church, Tucson, AZ 85701, EE. UU.

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In this assignment we were required to gather field work from two different sites we might consider using for our final unit project. We had to describe the site, provide photographs, interviews or overheard conversations, and other types of documentation we thought were important to gather. This assignment allowed me to practice problem solving because since they were both public areas it was hard to get good pictures since the world wasn’t stopping for my picture. Also gathering enough information and evidence in that one field trip to my chosen location without knowing if it was going to be enough and out of that fieldwork I was able to support my arguments and provide evidence about my story map. An example of how this assignment helped me develop a deeper sense of critical thinking is my description when I say “I interpret it as a border representation because inside of there we are all going somewhere but everyone has different destinations.” And out of that quotation I got my final thesis, and it was only an observation of my traveling through the sun-link. Being able to transform simple ideas into a complex interpretation and providing evidence which support my argumentation of a certain topic will allow me to enhance my credibility when providing ideas to new projects or even simple cases in my fieldwork.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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SL/Av del Convento/Congress St, Tucson, AZ 85745, EE. UU.

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The purpose of this artifact was to create a model of what we were going to do, be it a story map or a fotonovela. This allowed us to have a better and organized idea of our project and the intentions we were looking to fulfill by making it. In the section of model text we were to reflect on specific sections of the model text we were analyzing in regards to its purpose, audience, rhetorical appeals. By doing this we were able to practice the identification of these rhetorical awareness in texts we are not yet familiar with. An example where I did this was when I chose a quotation of the text I was analyzing and wrote about what I got out of it: “‘The purpose of this story map is to present in a clearer way the historic structures in Tucson, especially downtown. The audience targeted here are people who aren't familiar with this building's “new users” as they state. (Story Map Journal 1)’ ‘provides a streamlined approach to bringing new uses to existing and historic structures.’” With this we can conclude that out of a simple text I practice getting a deeper understanding of the real intention of the author. This goal will allow me to identify and interpret a text in a deeper meaning just by analyzing and having rhetorical awareness over the text.