Now that we’ve had a chance to introduce ourselves in person, I’d like you to take a few minutes and expand on your introduction in writing. Tell us more about yourself—anything from the silliest of personal quirks to your most serious aspirations. Keep in mind, you’re writing in a quasi-public space for the rest of your peers and your professor. Here are some questions you might consider:
* Tell us more about where you grew up. What was your hometown like? Describe it as vividly as you can and tell us what was significant about the place and how it impacted you as you grew up.
* What kind of writer are you? Describe your strengths as a writer and tell us about the kinds of writing that you most enjoy. Why do you think you like this kind of writing?
* Tell us more about what you study here at DU and what your major is. Why have you chosen this academic path? How do you think you’ll make use of it in the future? What do you want to be when you grow up? Why does this course of study and/or career interest you?
* What do you do for fun? What’s your ideal way to spend a Saturday when you have nothing to do? Why do you enjoy these activities?
Feel free to tell us anything else about yourself that seems appropriate as you write this introduction. Shoot for at least 250 words (feel free to write more). And try not to answer these questions in a list. Be more creative than that and generate an interesting post to our course blog.
When you are down with this exercise, cut and paste it into our blog as a comment. Flag me down if you have any trouble with this.
14 comments:
I grew up in Fairbanks Alaska. During the winter there isn’t much light. The least we get on the winter solstice is about 3 hours, but during the summer we can get well over two weeks of light and dusk. This changes how people act during different times of the year. In the winter people can be more reserved and a little slower paced. Needless to say, during the summer people have the must fun out of the entire year, that’s a fact around the world. What makes Fairbanks special is the sunlight. We are about 100 miles south of the arctic circle, so as the world rotates on it’s tilted axis, Alaska never goes into darkness.
During these precious summer months, I’ve had days that have lasted 50 hours and I’ve slept through entire weekends without realizing it. It makes me feel like I’m taking the summer for granted, but my best memories are of the midnight sky, lit with moon, sun and stars as I party with friends that never quit.
My strengths as a writer can be seen in this first essay. I can use the comma like nobody’s business, also the backspace.
To describe a typical Saturday of mine is to describe the best day of my life. It could be nothing or anything, but whatever I’m doing it’s definitely more relaxing or rejuvenating then what your doing. I never slip, I never fall.
I grew up in St. Joseph, MO, a town of about 80,000 people 45 miles north of Kansas City. My roots are embedded very deeply in St. Joseph, as my family has been there basically since the towns’ inception. Growing up in St. Joe allowed me to grow up around my entire family, and still to this day, I have the same friends I had in preschool. Although St. Joe isn’t a large city we had the convenience of Kansas City being only 45 minutes away. I spent a lot of time in the city growing up, so I almost feel as I got the best of both worlds. People always ask me if I will go back, and the answer is probably yes, eventually, maybe not to St. Joe, but to Kansas City. I want to raise my future children similar to how I was raised. Where I am from has always been very important to me, and I believe it has a great deal to do with who I am.
I see myself as a very average writer. As a business student I have never done much, if any, creative writing. I have always been told what to write and how to write it. I can form a functional piece, that makes good sense, and relays my point, but there is never anything to spectacular about it. Although I value the public school education I received growing up, I do believe it failed me in one particular way, I don’t think I know how to actually use commas. I never have, and in a half serious manner, I fully place the blame on my elementary school language classes.
I am a Management major at DU. I choose this after I transferred to DU from Colorado State University. I always knew I would pursue a career in business, but honestly don’t know why I went with the management concentration. I plan on graduating in November, I have yet to make any concrete plans about what I will do after I graduate.
I was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, Boulder is a beautiful city and there is access to so many great outdoor activities. But it’s also full of college students and drugs and the prices are so high that many people who work there can’t afford to live there.
The bubble of Boulder has always been a little too intense for me. When I was sixteen I dropped out of high school and went to a boarding school in Montana. I decided that for college I wanted to go somewhere different and experience new kinds of people, so I went to a small Lutheran college in Minnesota. I definitely found what I was looking for, but it wasn’t a good fit. I took a year off to travel and improve my French and Japanese, and now here I am at DU.
Traveling has always been an important part of my life and has encouraged me to care about the global community and helping to make the world a better place. I don’t know what I want to major in, I just know that I want to study everything that interests me and I want to leave more prepared to be someone positive in the world.
Less seriously, I care about a variety of activities that always put a smile on my face. My ideal free Saturday would include watching or playing basketball, eating good food and drinking good beer, and then a crazy night out dancing. I also love skiing and reading, but I think of those as being less social activities and to me Saturdays are for friends and families to relax together.
I don’t think I’m a particularly strong writer, but I love to write reviews on food for my family to read and next season I’m going to start writing about basketball just for fun.
As a kid my family moved a fair amount. I was born in Portland, OR and lived there until I was 4, then we moved to Mill Valley, CA where we lived until I was 9. After that, we moved to Denver, which is where I intend to be for awhile and where I consider my hometown.
I transferred to the University of Denver from CU Denver at the beginning of last year, however, due to a series of unfortunate events I have only attended one quarter of classes at DU. So, as a result, it is still up in the air as to what area of study I want to pursue. Ultimately, I would like to figure something out that would allow me to incorporate horses in it somehow, whether it is the importation and selling of them or being a trainer.
I am an avid equestrian. I have been horseback riding since I was 4 and currently own three horses from Denmark. I show competitively in both the hunter and jumper rings on the “A” circuit with two of my horses. My ultimate goal with riding is to eventually be showing at the Grand Prix level in the jumper ring. So, I guess you could say this is what I do for fun and sport.
My name is Mohammad Abuhadida, I was born in Kuwait city, Kuwait, as it was the place where I had been raised by my parents. Kuwait is located in the Arabic peninsula, in the continent of Asia. Relatively, Kuwait is a small country, in terms of the size; it is slightly smaller than New Jersey. It has a wonderful coastline along it east border. As I grew up between its streets, I have learned so many things, as well as I have gained many experiences. One of which, is the fact that whatever you try to do to pay your country back, you will never pay it back in full.
I consider myself as a good writer in my native language that is Arabic. However, in my second language, that is English, I would say that I am not as good as in my mother tongue language. My passion is reading history; hence, I believe that I can be at my best as a writer, when it comes to writing history. However, the lack of information would be my big challenge.
Since I was in High school I always dreamed of studying abroad in order to be more independent, as these are the years where one’s character and personality is shaped and formed. I have chosen the University of Denver, for many reasons. Besides its excellent academic progress, the mountains attracted me.
My dream is be a successful in every aspect of my life. To narrow it down to the career prospective. I dream of having my own accounting firm in the city of Kuwait within the next 10 years!
I was born in Randolph, Vermont and raised in Middlesex, Vermont a tiny town just minutes outside of the capitol (Montpelier). The house I grew up in changed over the years, beginning as a dome when I parents built it with some friends just after they had graduated from Goddard College. Though I grew up with dogs, my parents had previously raised goats, cats and chickens on their land. My mother taught music both in the public schools and privately, particularly students of the oboe and recorder. Dad worked with wood, building beautifully carved furniture of Celtic, Mayan and other tribal designs. Later he went on to carving weathervanes. Currently he carves maple bowls. Mom has gone on to only teach privately and plays principal oboe in the community orchestra.
As you can see, I grew up in a very artistic family. My sister and I have always been strongly encouraged to feed these talents. I have played the violin since the age of eight, and taken art classes for just about as long, though nothing most recently. My musicality drew me to birds, and bird watching, a guilty pleasure that later became my passion. Though the process was much more lengthy than this, birds eventually led me to Costa Rica, which ultimately led me to Spanish. Music of course played a large part in this interest as well.
After a two week “birding” trip to Costa Rica my sophomore year of high school I was determined to return there some day to study Spanish and the culture there. I wanted to speak Spanish fluently. Eventually of course I returned, this time for 11 months with AFS (American Field Service, an exchange program). The experience changed my life forever.
As a result of this experience I continued studying Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Vermont after high school. After almost 3 years of being unhappy in the United States and in Vermont, something finally changed. I met my husband, who had grown up in Colorado and had strong aspirations to move back. I decided it was time to transfer schools, and move to a place that could offer me so much more in my field.
Obviously, I ended up here in Denver where I have finished my Spanish degree with a minor in Anthropology. After graduation in August, I hope to move on to become certified as an ESL teacher, a goal that I have only set for myself recently.
As a writer I find it easiest to write about my own thoughts and experiences. I believe this is true of most of us, but I feel that my life experiences surpass those of many of my peers. For my age, I have gone through many things that those my age have not yet experienced or may never experience. In my writing, I hope to share these experiences so that others may learn from them, and for my own personal therapy. Writing allows me to express much more than I ever would be able to verbally. This is also true of my writing in Spanish.
In my free time I love reading, listening to music, bird watching or just being outside, and of course relaxing with my husband and mini schnauzer. Now a days between working full time and being a student full time, I do not have much time for the latter, so that’s where most of my free time goes.
I was born in Colorado. My family moved from Littleton to Highlands Ranch when I was in kindergarten. My parents say they chose HR for the school system; however, I feel the move was also to get away from my grandparents, who lived only 3 blocks away, yet still be close to my dad’s commercial printing company in Denver. The neighborhood was fine while my sister and I were growing up. Being a new neighborhood, there were lots of young families with children the same age as us. We had friends all around our house. As the neighborhood progressed, people moved away for job and money reasons. The neighborhood atmosphere slowly disappeared. Now, we don’t know our neighbors. Nobody talks to each other outside, not even a “Hello.” It’s…different, especially when the houses are so close to each other in suburbia that you can hear the neighbors phone ring if you’re outside.
Given this environment, my ideal Saturday afternoon would be spent at my grandmas’ house in Littleton, probably having a barbeque with friends and family (which includes my Beagle, Putter). They have a large backyard, so you can’t overhear a neighbor’s conversation!!! We’d play volleyball, badminton, frisbee, dominos, cards, and in general, just have fun. I would probably have to start a Super Mario Brothers tournament on the old Nintendo. That’s my favorite video game, the good old 2-D Mario that doesn’t save your progress. Then, the night would probably end with a movie, or if somebody happened to win Powerball, a plane flight to Europe or a trip to New York?
Besides Mario, I enjoy yoga, dancing, playing with my dog, coloring, learning, and singing with the radio. I always like to go to the Denver Center for the Performing Arts to see a play, musical, opera, or the CSO. Unfortunately, these venues are expensive, so I can only go once a year, with the exception of the Symphony because DU students can get $5 tickets to most concerts.
My least favorite question is ‘What is one word to describe your self?’ I only came up with a good answer to this question this year…Me.
Here's Rosie's comment:
My name is Rosie Wisdom. I am 19 years old and am a native Coloradan. I grew up in Colorado Springs and have lived there my entire life. I am an avid outdoors person and love skiing, hiking and biking. One of the greatest things about Colorado is the proximity to the mountains and all of the great opportunities they hold. I love to do anything that gets me moving and active as well. The Springs is a very conservative town which has greatly shaped my perspective on many things including religion and politics. I love how beautiful it is and how much energy it has—especially the old towns and neighborhoods. I really enjoy writing ever since I was little. Words are so fascinating to me so I really enjoy using as many of them as possible even when it can become a little confusing to do so. Besides word choice, I believe I tend to write better creatively than anything else and have pursued this arena in both my high school and now college careers. I entered my first writing prose contest this year which was really exciting albeit nerve-wracking. I really enjoy descriptive pieces and works that have some surprise ending or require a good deal of thought. I came to DU as a science major, which I still enjoy but am skeptical of how I can spend the rest of my life doing it. Now I am leaning towards the English side of things and am hoping to perhaps pursue writing or sociology in terms of anthropology. I am still unsure though where my life will lead and am hoping to get a better idea as time goes by. One thing I am very passionate about is jewelry making. I create much of my own jewelry and hope to sell some of it at local businesses. I spend a lot of time creating and thinking up new pieces. I also really love movies and see almost everything that comes out. Each year I attend the Sundance Film Festival in Utah with my family, as we are all movie buffs to some extent. I also enjoy watching TV even though I really don’t have the time to do it. My favorite shows are the detective mystery type and I really enjoy the dance/reality shows as well.
I grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, home of 5 million people, a mega city where everything runs 24/7. Because of its colony influence (once was ruled by Dutch, Spanish, Chinese Empire, and Japan), political complex, and deep roots of Chinese Culture, I have always been absorbing so many different information and stuffs since I was young. I came to the States for schooling since high school, and have been moving around quite a lot, ever lived in Michigan, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and my last two years of high school, I got stocked at boarding school in Maine, and now I am in Denver. My friends are always making fun out of me that they say I am always straying, and the world is my home.
I consider myself as surrealism writer. I am a visual person and my best work always comes from the image or the painting that I think is interesting. Since English is my third language, and I don’t have a formal language training such as ESL program, I have a quite few grammatical errors, and wrong vocab choices through out of my writing. I enjoy reading and writing in English, but sometime it just gets so frustrating.
I am a freshman at DU and will be a sophomore this coming fall. I have no idea about my future and what to do with the decision of my major. To be honest and beginning with, I don’t even know why am I studying at College. I just don’t know if it is right for me or not at all. Just because my parents or teachers tell me it is my path or most of Asians do go to the college, does it mean I do want it or not at all. I think this is just a fairy tale that people make you live in it. And unfortunately, I am not that ordinary and still living in this fairy tale.
I am a big outdoor person, and above of all, snowboarding is everything for me. I have been trained in the Maine Mountains out East and the one selfish reason I chose to come to DU is because of the Rocky Mountains. My typical Saturday or weekend through out the freshman year is partying and snowboarding out different mountains every weekend. I guess I have been living in the city for my whole life, so I want to go and live somewhere more peaceful and quite where no one can bother me.
So, I am originally from Fort Collins, just an hour drive north of Denver. FoCo, Fort Fun or simply the Fort as locals call it was a very chill place to grow up. CSU is located there, and the college creates a different atmosphere to the town. Honestly, without the college there, I think Fort Collins would be a bit of a backwater. It brings so much more life and diversity to the town. I once heard Fort Collins described as the town with ‘wide streets and narrow minds’, and I think it would be doomed to this without the student population. On a side note, if you do ever make it up north I highly recommend stopping by Big City Burrito. It beats out Chipotle any day.
Being from Ft. Collins I frequently get the question of why I chose to study at DU and not CSU. Frankly, I wanted to get away from the Fort. It seems like so many of my high school friends went to CSU or even CU and I wanted to meet some new people. I applied and was accepted to a couple schools out east and in the Midwest, but decided on DU because I would miss my mountains too much! I become miserably lost without them. My DU career has been a bit longer then most. The first four years I completed my BA in International Studies. Then, actually took a year off and came back for a fifth year to complete a BA in Economics. Economics is one of those subjects most people cringe at the thought of, but I am addicted… sick, I know. With my degree I plan to become either an FI driver or dictator of a small country.
As far as my writing goes, I have a bad habit of typing like I talk. So please forgive me ahead of time if my posts wander off mid-thought. I am actually looking forward to this class, as the type of writing required for it seems much more creative and open then the cut and dry research papers I have been writing for the last 5 years. Sometimes I really resent how academia has made my writing rather bland at points.
Growing up, I was in a smaller town, in which most people were not like me in quite a few ways, from seemingly the more small aspects such as the things you enjoy in a day, to larger ones such as to where those things lead. Through this, I was assisted in learning that if there is something that I believe is “right” for the given circumstance but is not actually occurring, the change should be made to correct this.
When writing, I have a habit of using a way to describe a situation without actually describing the items taking place. This can be both “good” and “bad,” depending of course on an individuals understanding of those words. I enjoy writing about the issues that have either an indirect or direct impact on the situation as it appears, and can therefore enhance my understanding of the contributing issues.
As a business major, I hope to find ways in which I can improve many areas. To do this, in the way in which I see it, these two aspects come together to form a contingent of ways necessary for observation. The reasons for this are many and sometimes changing, but the overall intention as previously stated remains similar.
In leisure times, I enjoy photography and some sports. Photography allows many times for both active and passive participation in a given situation, while assisting in a degree of control which, again, is sometimes good and sometimes not so good.
I spent most of my life growing up about twenty minutes outside of Philadelphia in the town of Bryn Mawr. My family moved to Bryn Mawr from a small coastal town in New Jersey called Rumson where the Rumson River meet the Atlantic Ocean. I attended the Haverford School, an all boys day school, for all ten years I lived in Philadelphia. While in high school I took a lot of pride in being a well rounded individual. I was a letterman in three varsity sports for three of the four years I was in high school. I was the captain of the football team and won two state championships with the lacrosse team. I was also very passionate about music. I sang in the glee club all ten years I was at Haverford and also sang in the school's A Cappella group. I enrolled at Hamilton College where I lettered in Squash and Lacrosse for two years while still following my musical interests by singing in the A Cappella group and majoring in music theory. During my junior year I shattered my left wrist playing fall league lacrosse which abruptly ended up collegiate athletic career. I had decided to attend a small liberal arts college primarily so that I could pursue my various interests simaltaneously. When I could no longer play althetics, I decided to leave rural upstate new york for Colorado. After spending a year and half living and working in Boulder and Vail, I transferred to the University of Denver.
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