Throughout the course of my first writing class in college I, often, found myself like many others in my class severely doubting our writing ability. As opposed to high school we were now in an environment where we were expected to perform under our own choices and were handed the reigns to our own writing. This was highly difficult for me for a large number of reasons. I am a heavy procrastinator and I tend to operate under the incentive of stress and pressure, however, these incentives were not as present during my first semester as a collegiate writer.

While writing my introductory essay I remember being so stuck on how to even start that I had to search up how other students in other schools had done their own introductions to their respective introductory papers. This was such a different

style from the usual formal academic style that I was used to writing in for any type of school paper that it threw me for a loop. I sat there for an hour trying to write the first sentence until I finally managed to crank that out and from there the rest flowed.

The rest of the papers were more of the same academic styled papers that I was used to from high school and so for those really the only thing that gave me trouble for all those papers was properly citing. I was never taught MLA, instead I was expected to learn it on my own, another aspect of college in general that gave me a lot of trouble trying to navigate through my first semester. It caught me off guard just how much unconscious research I caught myself doing for all my papers and having to cite all those internet checks really showed me how much my own research relied on that of others.

The piece de résistance was my final RCA paper, the most intense writing experience that I have ever had. Around the time this assignment was given out my family had just entered a period of financial struggle and so I had to take on several more shifts at my workplace. This led me to having to miss a good number of classes and limited the time I could work on any type of drafts which lead to incomplete draft after incomplete draft. The night before it was due, I got back from work at 1 in the morning and stayed up all night and through the next day to finish that paper.

It is a paper that I am proud of because while there were moments during the night where I feared that my paper would be an unintelligible mess, I managed to get a B, a higher grade than I could have expected due to my lack of preparation and refinement.

Overall, this semester has been a challenging one, a semester where I questioned my abilities as an academic, of intense highs and lows and mediocre in-betweens. I discovered that in order to succeed I had lose all those lazy habits I had formed and nurtured during high school. I am grateful for the experience as it has proven to me that I can do whatever I set my mind to and that with hard work there really is no way to lose in writing