Honors Institute

I think that the fact that Foothill has an Honors Institute to begin with is amazing. We have a large variety of classes with honors standing offered every quarter, and each of them can count towards being an honors scholar, which looks great to any college, and can almost guarantee you acceptance into UCLA. I also like that even though there are some requirements for being in the honors institute, along with an application process, I do not consider it an elitist establishment, primarily because it really is an institute which encourages everyone to try to join. The requirements are not outrageous and the application process is simple in that as long as you do actually apply and meet said requirements, you're in! I think that the only thing I would change is to add more classes, and encourage more students to join.

steve jobs

Steve Jobs' speech, while certainly inspirational, has little to do with my own personal educational path. I recently decided to major in business with the purpose of eventually getting into marketing. I did this, not because of a secret passion I have for business classes, but because I know that there are a lot of oppurtunities in this field, that it often comes with some kind of stability, and that theoretically I do think that it is interesting. Basically, I took the careers/majors that I know can realistically make money and I eliminated everything I didn't want to do. While I do think that it is important to do something you care about, I also think that most people compromise when they decide what they want to do. They pick something that they like, that they can theoretically succeed in, and that will realistically give them some financial stability in the long run. Doing what Steve Jobs did is difficult because it's living without really understanding what's going to happen in the future, which for most of us is a difficult and terrifying notion. On the other hand, it's not like he didn't have a plan at all. He knew he wanted a business, and that he wanted to be involved in technology, and that is what he did. He entered a field where he has talent, and where he knew that if he did succeed, he would be secure in every way. He just took a little bit longer to get there than many of us would like.

What was I supposed to be doing?

Besides procrastinating, which actually is my worst habit as a learner (BY FAR!), I also suffer from a short attention span. I will sometimes tell myself that now is a time to work, to get started on that homework or project or whatever that I've been procrastinating from for days or weeks, and then I will see something interesting on tv, or I will think something like, what's going to happen next in the book " "? and I will get completely sidetracked and it will take me that much longer to start on my work. Sometimes, I'll be sitting in front of the computer, ready to start typing or researching some topic, and I think, first I'll check facebook, which of course, is never a good idea. Sometimes I don't even need an action or activity to catch my attention, I'll just sit there, staring into space, thinking about some deeply philosophical issue, or maybe just something silly about my life, and I can stay like that for who knows how long! I daydream more than anyone should, it's practically a sport for me. Often when I daydream, I get up and start to pace, which tends to freak people out, but which I find very therapeutic. I am one of those people who can never sit still, I'm always fidgeting, and looking around, and doing and thinking just one thing at a time just seems like an impossible task. This is why the only way I can effectively study is to get into the mood of my particular task, so that it is dominating my thoughts, and just make myself concentrate on it for as long as I can, and then afterwards completely forget about it as soon as I don't need the information any more.

Type C procrastination

I think that it is very interesting to juxtaposition the article about type C procrastinators with the one about structured procrastinators. In a way, they are making the exact opposite statement. Structural procrastination is procrastination that depends on doing smaller things to avoid doing bigger things, until an even bigger thing comes up, and then the thing you were procrastinating will get done in order to avoid doing the bigger thing. Type C procrastinators avoid doing the smaller things, like daily errands, in favor of the larger things. In fact, the type C article describes a structured procrastinator as a type B procrastinator, which it terms "dangerous". In my opinion, both types of procrastination have some validity, but I myself am more of what I would coin a structured procrastinator, especially since I find the term type B procrastinator to be slightly offensive. I think that structured procrastination has many benefits. Usually, especially if you care about something, one way or another it will get done. Even the type C article admits that it's better to face a large problem from a different angle, rather than head on. For myself at least, looking at a big problem directly intimidates me and makes me feel like I can never get it done. I am an inductive thinker; I like to look at things starting from the details and working my way up to the big picture. I find that the only way I can attack a big problem is to start small, and usually the way that I do this is through structured procrastination. I procrastinate on the "more important" parts of the problem, and start with something small. Eventually, it all gets finished, but until then, small steps are key.

Cal Poly Procrastination

The Cal Poly theory of procrastination is that it's a psychological problem, brought on by things like low self esteem, perfectionism, being too busy and more. The aspects of procrastination that I identify most with are being too busy, and using procrastination as a way to cope with stress. I think that many people, especially students like myself, usually have a hundred and one things that we have to accomplish, all with some sort of deadline, and all with their own separate levels of importance in our own minds. There is no way that every single thing can be done the way that it should be, or could be, so we prioritize. We decide what needs to be done first, and then often procrastinate on that by doing something else, as discussed in structural procrastination. I also think that many people use procrastination as a way to cope with stress. If we think too much about all the millions of things that we have to do, and put pressure on ourselves to have everything done just right, we will all break down and have heart attacks. I think that this article makes many good points about the reasons for procrastination, and what we can do to resolve it, but there are things that I don't agree with. This article makes it seem as if procrastination is always a negative thing, and must never be allowed to happen, but I disagree. I think that often procrastination is a completely normal human response, and can sometimes even be healthy. Sometimes we need to procrastinate on certain things to make sure that other things get done, and also for our own mental and emotional health

Structured procrastination

The idea of structured procrastination appeals to me greatly. I myself have always been a lover of procrastination for most of my life, although my strategies have changed some over the years. I used to just never work at all; I never did homework, I rarely went to class, had no job, was involved in no extracurricular activities, and was generally a lazy bum. Now I have a method to my procrastination. Much like in the article, I practice structural procrastination. When I don't feel like doing an important activity, I do something else instead which also seems important in its own way. I convince myself of the rightness of the other thing that I am doing, when really I am only going it to get out of the thing that I was originally supposed to do. I continue to do this until something more important comes along which I am supposed to do, and then I finally get around to doing the thing I had been procrastinating doing, and begin to procrastinate the newer, more important thing.

The Journey

I am on a journey in my life with my schoolwork, and how it will lead to my future profession. My journey has lasted for the past three years, and is still continuing. It began with my first year at Foothill College, as a middle college student. I spent a year in middle college before graduating early, and this year changed my life. It got me out of the standard college experience, which I felt was suffocating me completely, and into a more mature, college atmosphere. This is the first year where I began to take school seriously, and actually seriously considered going to a four year university. I began to think of my major, and I decided on communications because it had a broad range of fields that I was interested in, especially marketing and public relations. The stage of my journey that I am currently experiencing is the CALL. I have received the CALL in the form of changing my major to business. I decided very recently that I needed to pick a more specific major, and settled on business marketing. However, my CALL has come in many other forms too. It is what made me seriously begin to think about my future. It is what inspired me to really consider different career choices, and to finally make a decision, even though it was a frightening and difficult choice. I am a very indecisive person, and settling on one specific career path has always terrified me, but I finally realized that making this choice is just a part of growing up which we all have to face. I am enormously grateful that I made this decision at Foothill instead of at a four year university, saving myself and my family inordinate amounts of both time and money. Now I just have to wait and see what happens.

I think that there are a lot of things that I could do with digital storytelling in my own eportfolio. I would probably make a video about how I have changed over my years at Foothill, and show evidence in the form of samples of writing to depict the specific ways in which I have changed. For instance, one idea for a digital story was to make one about my experience being the Vice President of Activities in student government. I could include projects and papers I've done in leadership class about what I've accomplished, along with fliers for different events. In any digital story that I might do, i would try to incorporate my own personality. I would try to seem natural, along with also hopefully seeming funny and interesting. I would want some of my own goofy personality to show in my digital story. Of course any digital story I do will also have to include reflection. I would reflect not only on events in my life, but on how they have affected me emotionally, and how they have affected my decisions. I would also want to do a digital story talking about my family and how they have affected my life. I would want to speak about the ways that they have pushed/inspired me to change and grow, and what I have gotten out of being a part of their lives. Along with this, I think it would also be interesting to do a digital video about my friends. In the past couple of years I have made the best friends of my life, and they have changed me in more ways than I can imagine. I would probably include pictures of us together over the course of our friendship, along with perhaps pieces of writing about how they have impacted my life. 

I have been at Foothill for three years now, and the experiences that I have had here have changed me so much that I can barely remember the person I was before I came here. I am more confident and self-assured than ever, and no matter what happens later on, I feel that I can make my way through it, and become a better person through all of my experiences. This, more than anything, is what I would want to depict in my digital story. I want to show how I have changed and will continue to change, and how Foothill has helped me to realize who I am.

Google Apps seems to be a very organized and efficient way to make an eportfoltio. First of all, there is eBlogger, which we are using now in class, which is a good way to prepare for making an eportfolio. Every week we get a topic of interest and we respond in the form of a blog, and since all of our blogs are on eblogger, looking at and responding to other classmate's blogs is relatively easy. While many of us have not attempted this yet, I'm sure that when we begin to it will give us a better idea of what our classmate's are planning to do with their eportfolios, and perhaps even inspire an interesting idea or concept. I think that Google Docs is probably one of the more interesting tools that Google Apps provides us with. It's a place online where you can attach a document, spreadsheet, or slide show presentation, and attach people's email addresses to it so that they can automatically get an email with a link to the site. Then, either party can edit the document and both new and older versions will be saved. The only potential problem I see with this tool is that it might become difficult to keep track of the different versions, in terms of who edited what.

Google video is also interesting, because it allows us to easily put links to videos into our eportfolio. Google notebooks allows us to keep notes or journal entries about anything that we've seen or done on the internet for our own private use. Google reader, which is probably the second most interesting application in Google Apps, allows us to create one place where we put the sites and blogs we've subscribed to and new posts automatically show up for us to read. This is interesting because it makes it much easier and more time efficient to look through blogs then physically trying to find them. At the same time, if we have several blogs and sites we're subscribed to which constantly have new posts, the sheer magnitude of how many new posts pop up on a regular basis may be overwhelming. Also, there is Google Page Creator, which is where you can actually pull things from Google Docs or anywhere else to create your eportfolio presentation.