Why Is Wisconsin Better Than Illinois?

Now I am not saying what I am about to discuss pertains to everyone that lives in Illinois but this is just my experience thus far.  Choosing to come to school in Illinois was exciting for me because I got to experience being away from home and living in a new area.  As time went on, I realized that the town of Romeoville was a little more dull than my hometown and what I was used to.  I feel that Wisconsin has more natural beauty than Illinois and driving in Wisconsin is more enjoyable because there is more to look at.  In Illinois, it is extremely flat and there is not many scenic routes to take.  Now I will give it to the flat-landers, you all have the city of Chicago which is awesome and I love to visit, but at the same time we have Milwaukee and that is a more relaxed, not-as-overwhelming Chicago and is easier to get in and out of.  We also have a city on the lake and there are beaches to hangout and seafood places to eat.  Not to mention we have the Brewers and the great tradition of tail gating as well as the Packers and the great tradition of winning.  Overall, I feel that the people in Wisconsin are nicer, we have better cheese products, as well as better drivers.

What Will I Do this Summer?

Summer is just around the corner, which means it is time to get a job to support my "summer needs". During the school year, my parents were able to help me with some costs because I was constantly playing volleyball and did not have time for a job, but now that I have three and a half months for myself, I need to get a job.  Luckily, our close family friends just purchased a business that was about to close that is local and about a 5 minute drive for me.  This looked to be a prime opportunity for me in getting a job where I could serve, make great money, and see familiar faces all at the same time.  I look forward to the summer also because it'll be good for my body to finally have time to recover from our season and I will be able to focus on lifting and lifting only.  Besides working and working out, I look forward to spend time with my family and friends, whether it is playing lawn games in the back yard or having family dinners.  I cannot wait to be back in my own bed at home, see my dog, and also take showers without having to wear sandals.

Finals Week

When looking at finals week, it is a time of sleepless nights, taking adderall and drinking coffee to attempt to stay awake, and studying for 8 hours the day before the actual test.  When finals come around for me I make sure to take it one day at a time and I try not to cram everything into a single day.  If I worry about the project or test that is the very next day and knock those out one by one, things seem a little more simple and less stressful.  The tough part is finals week means the last week of school with friends.  Everyone tries to hangout and balance their social life with school and sleep.  I am not going to lie I have definitely chosen going out with my friend over hitting the books, because that's what college is.  There will always be that buddy of mine that lingers over me and somehow has nothing to work on and will badger me to come hangout and drop the books.  This is extremely tempting from time to time and occasionally i cannot resist.  In all seriousness, it is important to sustain a social life, but at the same time maintain the grades you want, especially when finals roll around and your tests determine whether you pass or not.

Experience Composing WP #1

For this writing project, I chose to write about respect and what it meant to me and what it should mean to everyone else.  I struggled with this paper because it was the first one I wrote for Dr. Wielgos and my major point I needed to fix was my passive voice.  He actually used my paper in front of the class as to what NOT TO DO when writing the next essay.  We had to go through each one of my passive voice sentences and try to identify the subject and verb and then fix it so that it was in active voice.  Though this was somewhat embarrassing, it made me realize that I needed to do better writing in active voice for the next paper, and I knew Dr. Wielgos only wanted to help me become a better writer.  When writing in active voice, I had a larger variety of ideas and was able to write more complex sentences and express myself in a more intellectual sense.  After writing this project, I knew more of what the standards were for the papers to come and had to correct my previous mistakes.

Experience Composing WP #3

This was probably my favorite writing project of the semester because it gave me the opportunity to pick a topic not many of my class mates knew about and become an expert on it.  Through research and many sources from the internet as well as academic journals, I found out all about the topic of sweatshops.  I understood the instructions to this paper better than any other, after much trial and error, and realized I had to synthesize two or more sources per paragraph and then relate the information.  I made sure to introduce all of the authors and qualify them appropriately as well as cite their information correctly.  With this paper, we also did an annotated bibliography which was a nice refresher because I haven't completed one since high school.  It was a tedious process, but it is something I may need to do in the future (as far as the annotated bib go) and there will definitely be more research papers to come.  One of the cool things that went hand-in-hand with this project was writing project #4 or the celebration of scholarship presentation to the class.  It was enjoyable to learn about other's presentations and was curious to what others chose for their topic of research.

WP #2: Final Revision Process

The issue with my writing project #3 paper was that I did not write it in an explanatory sense.  I did for majority of the paper but it became too persuasive from time to time.  I now realize that the point of the explanatory paper is to explain a topic to the target audience and leave it at that and not go any further on taking sides than I need to.  I liked this writing project because we learned to incorporate an image and imbed it in the text, properly cite it, and relate it to my other information.  This was the turning point for my grammar as well and learning not to use passive voice on a consistent basis.  I realize now that my writing sounds more intelligent and the sentence variety expands immensely when i learned to write without the words "is, are, was, and were".