By: Leo Chu Hamza Suhail

 The class is all about is learning how to look at things in ways that you never have before and to apply critical thinking. All about the media and how they make stories dazzling, and make us have certain ideas. Also learning about media role in big events like 911 and the Iraq War. In the class you learn how people portray things in different ways and use own methods of doing things. Sometimes we get our ideas and apply ideas from what is being portrayed already. It is focused on idea of framing, and concepts of watchdog or patriotic journalism, where watchdog look into it, and patriotic say to go ahead and do it.  Professor O'Brien's First year Seminar Class is very organized. She explains how she runs the class in the first day that you walk into class and her rubric is very detail. The very point thing I want to point out that I really love how Professor O’Brien does is she keep us forces throughout the whole semester but she is lenient. She explains the homework’s that we have to do in the beginning of class which was very helpful to me because I tend to sometimes not know how to do a homework that was assigned.  Every assignment that she gives us we want to try to do our best and hand in whatever we got because she rather have something then to have you not hand in nothing at all.  In her class, you will be writing 2 major papers which is Essay One and Essay Two.

 Academic self-assessment plays a big role in First year seminar classes in Professor O’Brien’s class. You have to be prepared and ready to work independently on paper and be able to find the right idea’s. You have to be motivated and willing to learn so that way you will not fall behind in her class. Try to hardest and put in all your effort coming into this class and you will receive a good grade. Professor O’Brien is a very opened person so she can tell if your working your best or not. Even thought you don’t then to do good, she excepts anything you give her. She is very thoughtful and very understanding if you are struggling. Professor O’Brien is always around for help during her office hours and making appointments with her too.

 In this class, teamwork is really important. The class also teaches you about teamwork. You learn how to work with others. Teamwork is used when trying to come up with ideas. At some points in the class, get in groups and do assignments together. Teamwork is important in general because it gets stuff done faster, and sometimes, you are not always able to figure out stuff by yourself. Things can get done easily and accomplished better

 In the class, it teaches you a lot about critical thinking. It teaches you to look at things and see the other side and angles of It. It teaches you to see why certain things are, and how to think critically on stuff you learn. Get more deep in to what you just read and learned. Examples is we look at pictures, and articles and figure out why it is that. Also write essays where readings get looked at and we try to figure out if watchdog or patriotic is better and figure out why we believe. Critical thinking is important because new stuff get expos that were never before.

 Clear writing is very important in First year seminar classes because this is where you want to start to write clean and knowledgeable papers.  In FYS classes just like mine in Professor O’Brien class, she teaches us technique of how to improve our writing skills so it becomes more clear  For my experience in her class. I felt that I really improved a whole lot from the first day of walking into this class. I use to not be confident in my writing at all because everything I use to write I felt was still like high school level. Now that we are a week from this semester being over, I feel that I improved on  1. writing skills 2. vocabulary 3. clearness4. more forced on the topic and not go off topic 5. organization 6. better thesis 7. finding better sources to use

 G114 First Year Seminar Spring 2013 UMass Boston  Introduction to FYS by LChuHSuhail is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.