My name is Rachel, I use she/her/hers pronouns, and I'm looking forward to taking your class this fall! I graduated high school in the class of 2020 and took a gap year in Israel before coming to Boston University. My gap year was amazing; I lived with people from 4 different countries, volunteered as a First Responder in ambulances, and took some informal Hebrew classes. As wonderful as my year was, I haven't been in a formal classroom setting since March of 2020, which definitely contributes to my anxiety about starting college. Nevertheless, the start of in-person classes excites me.

I registered for this course mostly because of all the available WR 120 classes that were available, the topic of prisons in our society interests me the most. When I was in elementary school, my family's favorite sushi restaurant was about 20 minutes away by car, and we would drive past the Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall. I remember feeling intrigued by the concept of children (in my head, they were my age) being locked in a prison. Later, in middle school, I began watching documentaries on Youtube about life in prison in different regions of the world. I learned about the prison system in Norway, where nearly all prisons are focused on rehabilitation, a stark comparison to U.S. prisons which make money off of their residents. The Norway prison system makes the U.S. prison system look cruel, seeming to strip prisoners of their humanity, one insult or mistreatment at a time.

I haven't, however, given a lot of thought about how I personally perceive prisons and how my surroundings have shaped those perceptions. For example, our first class today was my first real glimpse of how we, as a society, have been dehumanizing incarcerated people through portrayal in the media and our own day-to-day language. In this class, I hope to become more self-aware of my biases and perceptions and to actively work against those biases. Since I truly believe the first priority of prisons should be to rehabilitate its residents and prepare them to eventually reintegrate into society, I'd love to be more educated about how that change can genuinely happen given the structure of current prisons in the United States. 

In high school, I took English 9A and 10A, followed by AP Lang. and AP Lit. I loved all of those classes, but I do feel like my writing style changed significantly when I took AP Lang. in my junior year. The AP English classes focused almost entirely on timed essays with specific formulas for each paragraph, which makes sense as it was really a test-prep course. I do, however, feel like my writing skills worsened during this time period. The essays were meant to be quick, and not thought-out or revised in any way. When it came time to write college applications, I felt nervous, because it had been so long since I had written multiple drafts of anything, let alone essays with complex and nuanced topics such as a personal statement essay. 

When it comes to my strengths as a writer, I feel confident in my ability to express my ideas in a logical way, bringing the reader along with me. In person, I like to think I'm a good storyteller, and I hope that skill transfers into my writing abilities. I do struggle with the flow of the ideas as I'm writing, and I tend to feel like my transitions between my ideas are forced and formulaic. This semester, I hope to write more naturally, and to improve my writing lexicon as well. I would also like to get into the habit of writing more regularly, and get used to writing multiple drafts and to become more efficient with revisions and rewrites. Lastly, I look forward to learning about prisons in the U.S. and generally being more informed about what incarceration is really like and how the system can be improved.

Sincerely,

Rachel Loran

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