Final Project

Final Video 

Final Thoughts

Over my first semester here at Southern Connecticut State University I have learned a great deal about myself.  I also feel as though I have gotten a feel for what’s expected of me as a college student.  I have had to take on a lot more responsibility with getting my work done, and also keeping up with my job and family and friends. 

I think I do need to work more on prioritizing my time and not procrastinating so much on bigger assignments.  I feel as if my grades could be better if I hadn’t waited so long to start assignments, or done them as good as I could of, instead of the bare minimum requirements. 

My biggest challenge at school has been my anxiety.  I ended up missing a lot of classes because I couldn’t get myself to show up.   I assume professors think I was just slacking off and didn’t feel like coming to class, but it was more than that.  I moved home because living at school made my anxiety levels a lot higher and then when I did live home, it was easier to make the decision to stay home from a day of classes because I was so far away from school. 

I’ve tried to force myself to go to school and get my work done despite my anxiety.  I tend to look at the big picture of things rather than take it one day at a time and I think this is one of my biggest downfalls.  There were times during the semester that I thought ‘there’s no way I can do x amount more weeks of this’.  But if I tried to look at it as, ‘today all I have to do is this and this’ it makes things a lot more manageable and easy.  I also hope that reflecting back on how fast this semester went by will be a good motivation for the rest of my career at Southern Connecticut State University. 

My biggest achievement would be getting a really excellent grade in one of the classes I was worried about.  It was a class on school health education and when I walked in the first day, I realized everyone in it was much older than me.  I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with students who have had much more experience at college than I did, but I ended up getting the highest grade of the class on our first test and a really good grade on our second test.  I was also able to put my anxiety aside and present a lesson plan to a group of older, intimidating students and do a really good job with it. 

I was able to get good grades on the exams because I did a lot of studying for that particular class.  It was a lot of random facts thrown together on each test ranging from calculating a persons ideal heart rate when exercising to knowing where most injuries happen at school.  I took notes on my own time out of our book, and rewrote them as a studying method.  I learned in high school that copying notes worked well as a study strategy for me so I liked to use it for this class. 

My time management over this semester has improved a lot than what it was at the beginning.  I’ve done less going out and more staying in and getting work done. 

I think that in the rest of my time at SCSU I want to get much better grades than I have now, especially if I want any hope of getting into the nursing program.  I plan to spend more time on my work and keep better track of my assignments to make sure everything is turned in on time and done as well as I possibly can do it! :)

Life After College

I don't really know what to expect for my life after college because I don't know if I'm capable of reaching all the goals I've set.  In an ideal world, I would get an excellent GPA and be excepted into Southern's Nursing program at the end of my Sophomore year.  I'd complete everything on time and be out of here in 4 years. (Unfortunately, Southern has already set me up to go here for 5 by giving me the wrong classes my first semester.)  I'd get a job at Yale or Saint Raphaels (I think I heard they're merging?) in New Haven and maybe begin to specialize in working in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  I've heard it's very hard to get into the NICU because of how many people want that job.  I'd hope to get a stable career and then work on getting married and having kids and all that other stuff!

Project Outline

So far, I have not gotten a lot done for my project.  I have, however, created an outline and started some of the research I need to complete my project.

- Introduction of Problem.. Forced to pick career at 18
- Other student's saying they're equally confused (interviews, quotes?)
- My plan of some part of nursing field
- Explaining different levels of nursing
- Assistant, Practical, Registered, Practitioner.
-Explaining my possible choice and why
-Slide of ideas to help out other students pick their possible career
- Credits

My plan to make my video interesting and creative is to try to make it appealing to students.  I'm not going to include long, drawn out interviews like I had in my first video, and I'm going to try to use a lot of numbers and statistics to get my ideas across.  I think statistics and numbers in bullet form will help make my project more easy to pay attention to and enjoy.

Final Project Proposal

For my final project, I'd like to do a project on the career I'm choosing.  I think deciding your entire life's plan when you're 18 and a freshman in college is very stressful and difficult for most people.  Through my first semester of college I've felt a lot of pressure to know exactly what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.  I need to pick the right classes and study the right things in order to get the correct degree I'm going to need.  I've thought about the idea of leaving Southern Connecticut and going somewhere else, like Gateway, to get an associates in nursing rather than a bachelors. I don't know what the difference in career and salary would be with these two different degrees, and that's one of the things I want to look into for my project.    I'd like to create a project on the different levels or nursing to help me decide what I'm going to pursue.  I know that there are many different kinds of "nurses".  There's nursing assistants, practical nurses, registered nurses, and nurse practitioners.  Each has different skill levels, education levels, and salaries.  Some require college, some require graduate school, and some require only short programs and a certification test. 

Reading Response for Krista's Group

I remembered that Krista had said that she was going to use the video project topic for our next project as well and that's what I saw when I opened her group's readings.  I thought this was a really interesting topic and I was happy to learn more about it.  Their first reading was friendly to read and easy.  I thought the second reading didn't look so friendly and was more of one big block that I skimmed through more than I read.  After reading the articles I think I have decided that I'm a Kinesthetic learner.  Throughout highschool I seem to have done better in classes that had some type of hands on learning, like my sciences and arts.  I have always loved math, but sometimes I just can't comprehend what is going on because it's purely hearing and seeing and there's nothing you can touch.  It's more of an abstract concept and I think this makes it difficult for me sometimes.  I chose nursing as my current career path for many reasons, but one of them would be that its very hands-on with patients.  I'm extremely excited to get to actually be accepted into a nursing program (fingers crossed) and get to work with all the equipment and the dummy patients, as I think I will do much better with this than I do with abstract concepts that you can't actually use your hands in.  To me, Krista's group chose a really great topic to teach us about because it directly relates to all of us and how we learn best in college.  I do think though that they could have chosen more interesting readings on the topic. 

Double Campus Safari

Campus Safari 1 - This week I took a trip to the health center.  I have the worst immune system of anyone I know, so of course I'm sick.  I wanted to make sure I didn't have anything worse than a cold so I made an appointment.  I waited in the waiting room before I was taken in.  The woman who saw me was a nurse practitioner.  She took my temperature and my blood pressure and then listened to my lungs.  She also gave me a rapid strep test, which thankfully came back negative.  I asked her some questions about the cold to be able to make it into a campus safari post.  I asked if there was anything I could do.  She told me that because a cold is a viral sickness, things like antibiotics are ineffective and are only used for illness caused by bacteria.  She told me to take ibuprofen and gave me a goodie-bag of cough drops, a reusable super cool paper thermometer, a fact sheet, and a decongestant.  She said that colds typically last 10 to 12 days so I should be prepared for another week of feeling less than great.  She also gave me some tips on how not to spread it to my roommates, like cleaning the door knobs and other things we all touch.  All - in - all I think the health center was great and a really good alternative to a student's normal doctor when they live on campus. 

Campus Safari 2 - This week I also went to the library to meet with my Inquiry group.  After we had finished our meeting, I went to find a book that my Anthropology Professor has discussed with us.  We eventually need to get it to read some passages.  It's called "Patterns of Culture" by Ruth Benedict.  It was in the SCSU stacks and had the call number GN400.B4.  I thought it was relatively easy to find after we had our library instruction earlier in the year in Inquiry.  The library seems pretty simple to get used to and it's easier to get used to finding the things you want than I had expected. Being a wishful thinker, I was hoping this book was a novel or had some sort of story, but I should have known from the title that this wasn't the case.  When I flipped through it I saw that it had absolutely enormous chapters, all of them about 50+ pages, and I know that we already have to read two over our Thanksgiving break.  The writing seemed technical and bland, but hopefully it's something me and my classmates can get through easily!