Stories have interested me in the past but those were mainly from what I remember shows from tv like Spider man or Spongebob. Books I had mainly seen when I needed to but I would usually choose magic treehouse series of books because I did like the stories and adventures the characters get me. They were all interesting but I haven’t known them much other than being fun until 9th grade. During 9th grade, I had an English class which was okay during the beginning, however when we reach I think the middle and end of the year. We began to analyze more about stories like what they have and all of that which we did do at the start but it got interesting with learning one part of writing some stories. The part we learned during the middle was foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is when a hint to something that happens in the story in the future. This had me interested a lot when I heard about it and the reading I think we had and analyzed was the Veldt. In there it had some analyzing we had to do and one I remembered while writing this was the lions. In the end of the story the lions had eaten some people and was heading out to drink, this was possibly foreshadowed with how in the beginning it talked about lions eating and it heading to drink water, exactly what the lion had done at the end of the story. This was a spark of interest with things later on in the future furthering my interest, an example was a show they revealed in that class being Black Mirror. It led to me searching the show with how interesting the concept was and how much detail is placed into each episode which has its own story in them. They had introduced me to something else in stories which was symbolism. Symbolism is when there they show something that has a meaning behind it. An example could be using pink to represent love or red to represent something dangerous. These two aspects in stories had me look into more stories and enjoyed them a lot more. Some of these stories were Attack on Titan, Death Note, Xenoblade and possibly more that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Ashraf Alam

Prof. Rice-Evans

8/18/22

Freshmen Eng. Comp. 

WLLN: First Draft 

A recent troubling moment that I had: was when having to write a scientific paper for both AP Capstone and AP Research. Having written loads of scientific papers before that point (credit to my science research class), however, these two papers were different in the sense that the language used and the way we had to format the paper was something I had never seen or done. Also, we were the pioneering class to take this course; there was no reference to go off of, and the papers themselves counted for about 60% of our final grade (the other 30% being the presentation). The hardest thing I can remember was the formatting: we needed to write the paper in a way such that our reference articles (which had to be all scientific papers/articles/journals) “needed to talk to each other”; the style was something I had never seen or written, and to say I had trouble was an understatement.

The AP capstone paper, in particular, was troubling due to the use of different lenses and the incorporation of stakeholders we needed to write about for each referenced article we used. There were eight lenses, but we had to use three. In the beginning, finding reference articles was not complex; having a science research background helped a lot, but the formatting and writing were other issues: I could not “solve” so easily. It took over four-six versions of the paper (all proofread by my instructor and peers) for me to get something decent. The first struggle came when detailing the findings; I was incorrectly listing the work under the wrong lenses/trying to make the articles fit into lense that did not. Trying to connect lenses when they did not fit was not fun. Considering my paper, how the socioeconomic status of adults and its effects on their levels of happiness in rural China: viewed from the social, economic, and political lenses was not an easy task. What was harder was the last paragraph: we had to interconnect all three lenses to make them “talk to each other” (this also acted as our closing statement).

Continuing to the next year (AP research), we had another paper, but it was our study. We had to conduct either a human subject study or an experimental study, collect, analyze, and interpret data; this was what we were doing in our science research class, but this paper was more scrutinized and harshly graded. The AP research paper followed the same format as any basic science paper: the abstract, introduction, methods, results, data analysis, and conclusion. The only troubling part was that the reference articles (background research) had to build off each other. If the idea did not follow a logical direction, it was marked wrong, and we would not get those points. One article introduced an idea, the following article built on that idea, and so forth until we came to our study and how it was relevant to modern society or our bigger “question”/”topic” that we answered. I had some experience at this point: granted my experience from writing the AP Capstone paper.

Coding. It has been the single most thing that has changed my life forever. I took my first ever coding class, Intro to Computer Science, with Mr. Segal. I had this teacher for geometry from the following year so I was a little excited about what he had in hold for us in this class. So when I say that this class, along with my teacher, has changed my life, I meant every single word of it.

I was always very fond of the technological field but I never knew what I particularly wanted to do with myself. But after writing down my first line of code,

System.out.println(“Hello World”);

I knew that this was going to be a defining moment in my life. I’m not saying that this class didn’t have its downsides because it definitely did. Coding was really challenging but even though it was frustrating at times, I loved doing it. I would often take projects home with me so I can find out what line of code prevented the whole thing from working. But after hours of continuously working, I managed my way around it. All my hard work paid off and I finally got a point where I was the one helping other students and peers out with their code.

I felt so inspired by my love of coding that I created a club at my school called the Game Design Club with my amazing teacher Mr. Segal where I introduced coding to those who never coded before. I got to share the same passion I had with coding with others and that made me feel accomplished. And after introducing this to others in the community, I began working on creating some games with code which became really next level coding. I thought my class projects were hard but creating games doesn’t even come close to this. But I’m glad I got the opportunity to find what I love to do at such a young age. I’m really thankful for my teacher for taking the time to help me get better at coding and for making such a big impact on my life.