Writing Portfolio

I have never been "good" at school, I took AP and IB classes in high school to challenge myself, but most of my teachers would say I wasn't going to do well in their class, mostly because have some learning issues due to the fact that I had leukemia as a child.I was always the one with the essay on the board that people would critique and there would always be people saying "who wrote this" and everyone would laugh, or would get a math problem wrong and pretend it was a joke so people would not think I was slow, but the truth is I am "slow". Due the amounts of chemotherapy that went through my body at 3 years old the Myelin in my brain was stripped, which makes my process speed slower, so I really am slow. One thing that has peaked my interest since I can remember and is really the reason I never gave up in high school is that I want to be a Genetic Counselor for Cancer. I want to help people learn about the same disease I overcame and I want to be able to sympathize with them about their struggles the way I wished my peers did when I was in school. Now that I finally have made it through my first semester of college, which was something that many doctors did not think was ever going to happen because I was only supposed to be able to process up to a third grade level because of my brain issues, I can honestly say I am so proud of myself. Through this class and my RC 1000 class I believe I have become a better writer and no longer feel like the "who wrote this" girl I used to feel like. This has helped me express my thoughts more clearly and profoundly as well as learn how to manage work while not having an in person class. I am aware that I totally mismanaged my time these past few weeks, leaving this portfolio to not have an essay it was supposed to but that is my fault and this was a learning experience I needed to have in order to be successful next semester.Since my major is Public Health I believe that this class has set me up to review non-fiction articles such as the ones in our discourse reports and confidently write a report on my findings. I designed this portfolio to display my passions outside of school, as well as to display my strengths in my classwork and how far I have come while also recognizing my weaknesses.

My Work

Educational Proposal

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kke8E4jhtuha5lDZ5pot1WgnpaXpk9iafp_oSqjxXaw/edit?usp=sharing

Work Outside of Class

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gJy4IwsQsVnA00-Pt-soYUdQ02uPiy3HGU2azCRzZSE/edit

For my educational proposal I chose to write about having a later start time for high school in my county. I went to a school where many students had to work late into the night in order to know they would be able to have food on the table. Some of these students were ones I drove to school, they were always tired, never had homework finished and struggled to make it through the day. I believe that if my school system had a later start time these students would have been more successful in their academic and personal lives. I have been passionate about this change since high school and really enjoyed being able to express my concerns and advocate on this topic on paper.

The essay I chose from previous works is called Nursery University. In this essay I talked about how challenging it is for less fortunate parents to get their children into preschool in New York. I believe this ties closely to my educational proposal because in both essays I describe the struggles of less fortunate families amd school systems. This was a piece I wrote for my Sociology class and looking back on it I can definitely see where I have improved in some areas of my writing because of this class.

2025 – Human Eye View

Discourse Report

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E8IFjRotkYiQO56DOGL1FjszYWGYCB-cydc8HkERreg/edit?usp=sharing

Rhetorical Analysis of Movie Speech

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sNNlWxXGEPPAMnm1Jiv3krtimeKyQuCuc4BXSKv6q7Y/edit?usp=sharing

I chose my community discourse report because I think that it displays my passion for genetics and science while also showing off my skills of being able to report something with out bias. I really enjoyed the challemges that came from this essay because I had never really written a full report like that before. I wish I had managed my time better and had my literary analysis that tied into it because I had read a phenomenal book about the Muslim culture surrounding genetics and having babies that I would have tied into the religious delimmas that arise with gene editing. Overall I was very pleased with my work due this being my first report for something in my field but I still wish I had managed my time better so that I could have had the other essay to tie into it. I am eager to write more essays in my field relating to genetics because I felt like this essay lit my brain up and I was excited to keep writing and learning about my topic.

I chose this piece because I think it shows how far I have come in this class since then. Due to this piece being the first rhetorical analysis I have written since high school, it was definitely hard to stay confident because I felt like I forgot how to write but I have definitely improved since high school, and from that essay to the educational proposal I feel like I have displayed my growth. Rhetorical analysis essays have always been my weakness because I feel as if I change my mind on my stance too much and they get messy but I tried really hard to not do that and take each paragraph step by step and it helped a lot. I really enjoyed seeing how my writing has changed over the past couple of years and I am excited to write more essays like this to challange myself