COVER LETTER
Hello, my name is Jahan Amrin. I was born and raised in Queens, New York. After highschool, a college I really wanted to attend was the City College of New York. Due to the fact, that it has an intensive and competitive Engineering department known as the Grove School of Engineering. At the moment, my goals is to get accepted to that program by doing exceptionally well in my Calculus 1 and 2 courses, including my science subjects as well. Despite my desire to get into the engineering program to pursue a major in Computer Science. I do have other goals, which is improving my reading and writing skills.

Some of my failures in life and this class, was trying to get a high SAT score somewhere in the range of 1390-1500 and creating the perfect thesis statement. Though, I practiced a lot, I learned that you shouldn’t study harder but study smarter. I studied too hard and I messed up because the concepts that I learned were unorganized. Studying smarter, involves less memorization and more understanding, the more you understand something the better you are to remember on how to complete it. When I did my thesis statements in this class, I struggled to truly understand the main concept of a thesis statement, I thought thesis statements were more opinionated than a fact, in reality, it is a combination of an opinion and fact constructed in an argument. Many of my hopes for this class was to get at least an A on the papers that I worked extremely hard on, where I had two private tutors to go over my writing and help me improve it. But I am happy with the grades that I got, it did challenge me to work even harder

SELF ASSESSMENT

As a former student of the FIQWS 10103 class specifically focused on  Latin American History and Culture criteria. Some of the difficulties I experienced while taking this class was the writing expectations. In general, I do believe my writing skills aren’t the best, however I can say that after taking this class my writing skills did improve. For instance, I was never organized with the way I wrote my paragraphs. However, after taking Professor Aisha Sidibe’s class I now have a better understanding of how to organize my sentence in each paragraph. Another important idea I learned, is how to choose a specific topic instead of general. This challenge of specificity pushed me to do further and deep research to help me write a strong paper. Though, one thing that i’m still not confident to state is whether or not my thesis statements are perfect, I know they are somewhat better than what I initially would’ve wrote but they are still not the best. However, I do have a broader understanding of what a thesis statement is.

While taking this class there were indeed some assignments that I struggled to complete. Many of the assignments included the in-class essay, presentations, research paper. For the in-class essay, since it was solely prior knowledge and limited to the readings we had in class, I struggled on how to start the essay about “how should parents talk/teach their children about race and ethnicity?” since it was an in-class essay and we had until the end of class to do it, it was difficult to write because I personally take a long time to write one paragraph. When it was presentation day, it was my turn on October 10, though I was prepared and rehearsed, I still felt very nervous. I’m not very good at expressing my ideas with my words in paper or as a presentation, but I am getting better at writing my ideas but verbally I am still lacking in that skill. I hope to improve that skill in the future. The difficulties regarding the research paper was choosing a topic, I had no idea what I wanted to do especially the emphasis on being specific, I was a bit lost. Until, I remembered the Leslie Salzinger article about the Maquiladoras and how women were treated, I decided to write my research paper on that. In conclusion, I did learn a lot, especially the class being so engaging and interesting, I never lost focus or dozed off.