WLLN Essay

     To say the least for my life, I have always had the bad feeling of being embarrassed and uncomfortable speaking to people in real life. No matter what since a very young age, I’ve always had problems with talking to people in public on any subject. With the combination of being shy and enclosed by myself since I was young, it was always hard making friends which made me very quiet and not be able to talk to people. This made my life very hard with trying to improve my grammar and develop many psychological problems for myself. 

     Since the very early age of around 3, I began to talk to my parents in my first language which is Spanish and till this day I only talk in Spanish in my household. This was hard for me to learn both languages at the same time since both I’ve had to memorize, and it was hard for me to develop proper grammar. My mom and dad would be the ones teaching me how to speak Spanish in the house while I also had to learn how to speak English in elementary school. This led me to becoming very enclosed and shy around people who wanted me to speak even though I only knew how to speak Spanish. At around 3^rd grade when I transferred to my new school, I started taking ELS classes to help develop and improve my English grammar. For about 3 years until I graduated Elementary, I would only go to these classes for twice a week in order to improve how to speak English properly and have conversations. I would be scared to speak to my teacher, and it would be hard to learn quickly especially since it is hard to start conversations since I was very embarrassed if I ever messed up a sentence. 

On April 9th, 2019, I had emailed a girl I had never met before and will be spending 4 weeks under the same roof. This was part of the German-American Exchange Program that I had signed up for 6 months prior. I was filled with dread as sending the email meant that there was no backing out, or else I would disappoint everyone. I was nervous that I would be an outcast as I had no friends going on this trip and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make any friends due to my social anxiety. I had gone through forums, websites and even asked my therapist on how I was going to deal with my time there but nothing had really eased my nerves. 

Fastfoward to August 15th and I was now boarding my plane. After 4 months of constant messages between me and my partner, Emily, I would be finally meeting her in person. To say nervous was an understatement. I was nauseous, shaking, dropping things, and stuttering constantly when speaking to others. After my total 9 hours in the air, with one layover in Iceland, I had finally met Emily in person. As soon as I saw her, I felt all my worries wash away as I had realized that while I might not have known the other exchange students or partners, I had known her. I was not going to be completely alone because I had already made a friend while I was counting down the days and stressing over every small thing about my trip. 

This, however, was not the end of my worries as on the very first day, I had overslept and woke up at 2pm. I felt so embarrassed as the weeks prior to coming to Germany, I had tried to fix my sleeping habit. We barely made it to the museums that she and her family had wanted to take us to and I was so worried that I had just destroyed the plans that she had made. This made me spiral into a whole other set of issues I felt was going to ruin my time in Germany. 

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.