I am Andre Pickersgill, a Jamaican immigrant currently serving in the New York National Guard while being a full-time student. This journey of finishing my degree started a few years ago with many obstacles and life lessons, alas, I am here at City College hoping to determine to finish another life goal. English 11000 came with a few obstacles, the major being the fact I was out of school for a few years and had to adapt to deadlines and readings.
Before enrolling in this course, I figured I had a good grasp of English and writing. However, my assignments highlighted the improvements needed to my basic use of the English language, especially when writing objectively. Writing unbiased wasn’t particularly easy for me, I can recall peer review/professor feedback showing how much personal thoughts/feelings went into my writing. So the goal was now to fix that issue.
Our first assignment was a creative non-fiction essay, exploring how media influenced my identity. This was particularly different as I’ve never actually written about me, also I was unaware of the factors that contributed to my identity. Through class exercises like peer reviews and listening to my fellow classmates, I found the three factors that contributed to who I am. These factors are family relationships, nationality, and my sexuality. The issue was now to organize my thoughts so they could flow fluidly in my essay, the use of an outline helped tremendously. Simply writing down the main ideas and subsections made my composition process easier.
My exploratory essay sought to explore media addiction, specifically in gaming and social media platforms. Throughout this research, I struggled with the citation system, which kind of turned me into a nervous wreck in trying to avoid a plagiarism accusation. The use of the CCNY library database and google scholar helped tremendously in locating sources, and academic works that were credible. This assignment helped with my use of citations, critical analysis, and essay outline.
The research critical analysis was probably the easiest of all the assignments, only because I understood what goes into an academic paper, and maybe because I had experience in composing all the other works that I now had a grasp on writing, however, 9-10 pages made me nervous. How can I write a 10-page essay and what do I put in it? I started my research initially exploring shopping addiction on social media. Not much information was available since shopping addiction wasn’t a new phenomenon, in fact, addiction to shopping existed long before the social media age. I think pivoted into the effects of social media on shopping. There were many critically written papers in CCNY’s database, so I started exploring. Composing this research wasn’t difficult, I had armed with the information and the techniques for good writing. My thoughts were flowing, my sources were credible, my main ideas were outlined, and my computer was fully charged. Professor Rodwell read and gave feedback on my first draft and the rest was history.
The multi-modal translation and presentation were my final assessment. Translating my research critical analysis essay into a new form wasn’t complex, I considered my target audience and the information I wanted to put out. So, I chose to do my translation in the form of an Instagram reel since my message was about how social media influencers influence the spending habits of social media users, and I used bright colors PowerPoint with bold block letters to appeal to my class peers who maybe not as focused since our class was 8 am.
Overall, my English composition class was great, I thoroughly enjoyed the feedback and the journey. They say a journey starts with a step, and this is my first of the many along the road of college life.
