I am Katherine N. Vargas, an undergraduate freshman at City College of New York. Through my first semester of college, the experience of my Individual and Society FIQWS course with Professors Poe and Crohn have kept me engaged and focused with the helpful lessons an activities they have created for their students.

This FIQWS course tied the significance of societal roles and identity through multiple texts, many of which contained the superhero trope. Through Professor Crohn’s class, our deep philosophical conversations about what really defines good and evil taught me about similarities that lie within the good and the bad. This was seen through the many texts read about hero, where the heroic character was as confused about their identity and significance as that of the villainous character. Our class conversations highlighted the dark side that lies within anyone, even our heroes. Professor Crohn’s class also taught me the role society plays into the way people identify or view themselves, just as the villains in the texts read viewed themselves a evil even if they had an empathetic side just because society portrayed them as evil. Similarly, Professor Poe’s class portrayed the significant correlation of individualism an identity to societal roles and constructs through the use of personal texts, including literacy narratives, autobiographical essays and poems inspired on personal memories. Poe has not only made me grow as a writer with the journal entries done every week that ultimately caused me to find my true preferences and style as a writer, but she also taught us the idea of differences of people through such texts that demonstrated the similarities that people share even in different struggles and settings. Furthermore, both professors have taught me the importance society plays into individualism, where social constructs and how a person is perceived can be very different from who they are in both negative and positive ways. Individual and Society FIQWS course has highlighted the differences of people and taught me to embrace and understand them.

Additionally, I have grown more as a writer because I have practiced in both areas of English through the course: reading and writing. My goal to master my use of analysis and interpretations of texts were met through the skill sets of learning and defining the rhetorical situation. The course enabled my knowledge of English to grow through the the concepts learned like exploring and analyzing several different texts, my usage of the key terms of rhetorical situations, and composing texts that can be integrated with an argument. As much as these two professors demonstrated the importance of excellent analysis, their activities helped acknowledge the importance of the collaborative aspects of the writing process like peer reviews, as well as highlighting strategies used for reading, writing, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. Through the many essays written, I learned the genuine definition of a good essay through the demonstration of composing several diverse texts, which also helped me in my research process as I was able to better locate research sources and evaluate them through its credibility, accuracy, relevancy, and bias. Furthermore, as essays were constructed on a weekly basis, being able to properly and correctly give credibility was highlighted as essential to any form of writing, and as a result, practical systematic application of citation conventions were clearly taught and demonstrated, where I learned how to give credit to any text imaginable, including images.

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