Writing From Home and Why It SUCKS!!

So I'm going to preface this by saying Covid-19 really ruined a lot of my plans. I thought college was supposed to be a fun and social experience where I could meet new people and learn about interests that I have. However reality had other plans, as I have been cooped up in my room for almost a year now and I'm starting to hate it here.

Here is me practicing guitar since I have nothing better to do

While learning from home was nice for the first couple months, with asynchronous lectures and work that let me sleep in and have more free time to play games. Soon I could tell that the severe lack of accessibility to teachers and peers who I could discuss questions with made the classes much much more difficult.

Ultimately one the biggest contributors to my learning was discord, and the UCI communities that allowed me to ask my questions and discuss with fellow classmates.

Last quarter I took Writing 39B and similar to this class there were no synchronous lectures or office hours to receive feedback on assignments. Throughout the entire quarter I could count the times the professor talked to us on one hand. Despite receiving an A in the class, it was really difficult to understand my weaknesses and where I could improve as a writer.

Writing was never my strong suit, I never really enjoyed it and similarly I was never good at it either. I think I am decent at close reading and analyzing texts, however being able accumulate everything into an essay is hard for me. Finding an arguable topic and looking for strong quotes that augment my arguments is something I often struggle with. I hope that this time I can receive good feedback from peers as well as the professor to better understand my weaknesses and improve.

Our subject this quarter is Animal Science and honestly, coming into it I wasn't that excited but the first set of reading had a couple things that really interested me. The first was the research put into understanding intelligence as a precursor to understanding if animals are intelligent. The psychology and interesting ideas people made to define intelligence were quite intriguing to me, such as The Theory of Mind, and the 4 cognitive skills that Marc Hauser mentioned. Really the I feel that defining intelligence is the most important things we must do before we can say that animals have intelligence. Without a clear understanding and agreement for what intelligence is, there is bound to be dispute whenever evidence for animal intelligence shows up. The second really interesting thing was on friendships found between unrelated animals. I think what intrigued me the most was the fact that there were many different animals who created bonds with others, monkeys, horses, and dolphins, all had strong evidence showing friendship. It made me think about how friendship works for animals as well as humans and if there are more animals that are able to make friends.