My name is Grace Williams, and my portfolio represents the knowledge I have learned about romantic relationships within 19th-century Russian culture. Throughout the semester, I have learned about the history of Russian,  gender roles, nobility and lower class customs, marriage, and other significant aspects of society during the 19th century. Initially, I took this course to replace learning the Russian language as City College does not offer it. But I am glad I could learn about the culture, as understanding the culture is equally important as the language.  

I am currently a biology major and intend to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. I have taken an interest in environmental and earth science while attending college, so I decided to take certain classes with the subjects to change my career path later on.  Currently, I am focusing on becoming a Veterinarian as I have always had a passion for learning biological sciences and animal behavior. During the summer of 2019, I was granted the opportunity to volunteer at the Prospect Park Zoo as an educational guide and was able to talk to some of the workers who deal with the animals directly, such as zookeepers, zoo curators, and most importantly, the veterinarians. After meeting with them and discussing schooling and specific aspects of their job, it solidified how the years of rigorous veterinarian school and residency was worth the wait to do something enriching.  Even though my reasoning behind becoming a veterinarian was focused on helping exotic animals and opening my own veterinary clinic, I also wanted a financially sound job as I would like to support myself while doing what I love.  I believe that I will be able to achieve these dreams while attending City College and hopefully be able to open my clinic to allow other students to volunteer and explore their passion for animals.

Over this semester, I have learned various aspects of both 19th-Russian culture and society. The most exciting lesson was about the psychology of narcissism and how narcissism can affect behavior and relationships. I enjoyed learning about how narcissism tied into many 19-century societal norms such as dueling, love, and people carried themselves within their daily lives. The only aspect of writing that I may have improved on was reducing the amount of summarization I use within explaining character actions or behavior. Reading the writing guide texts did not help me as the best way for me to learn how to do a particular writing assignment is from looking over previous students’ examples and establishing an idea within my mind on what my writing is supposed to be formatted like and base my response on that. Even though the works on how to better one’s argument structure provided a guide on how future college writing should be formatted and developed,d on the best way to truly grasp the concept is to see the assignment’s previous work. This year’s college experience was very underwhelming and stressful. I was hoping this experience would allow me to shift focus towards college’s educational aspects and improve my schedule. Instead, I simply turned in assignments rather than understanding what I am doing and balancing personal time with the overwhelming amount of work. I know that the entire process of online learning is new for both students and teachers alike, so the pattern of work and testing may be difficult to formulate for teachers, but the lack of communication from certain classes plus the constant change of testing style has been problematic for me to become acclimated towards. In all honesty, I do not feel like my life has had any significant changes from transitioning into college from high school as I am still doing the same virtual schooling, just with more complicated work. At first, I was more agreeable with the idea of online education as I believed it would allow me to build a schedule and have more free time when in fact, I have less time then when I was attending class, and I continuously feel like I do not have any personal time for my friends or family. I already previously concluded that the Spring semester would be declared online during this semester, so my expectations towards my freshman year have dropped significantly. The one aspect of this semester that I did enjoy was the ability to talk to my friends, as even though I could not see them in person due to COVID-19 restrictions and personal obligations, we still made time to talk to each other and help each with work which I truly do appreciate. Overall, this semester did not positively or negatively impact my life as my expectations for this year were met as it was slow and repetitive.