Cover Letter/ Portfolio

Leticia Arellano

English 114B

05/15/12

                                                                      ‘My First Year At CSUN’

            The past following year has been a year full of achievement. I started my freshman year of college and now I’m ending it. I have learned so much over this past year, I also had to adjust living away from my home in a completely different environment away from my family. I also had to adjust to university courses, which are nothing like high school classes, but everyone knows that, and now that I look back, my high school spent so much trying to prepare me for this that they generally failed at this. In my opinion I think they just babied us and when it was time to go to college I think we were probably all shocked more than prepared. None the less I think that this year has been a year of many lessons learned. Ass the year started and carried on I learned so many things especially in this English class. We covered topics on a deep level; I was aware of these topics but never really broke them down and carefully analyzed these topics. I also feel like I became a far better writer as when I started the year.

            In the beginning of the year we learned more about how to write papers how to put our thoughts together. We also touched up on how to cite our work and we learned how to incorporate Ethos, Pathos, and Logos into our work to make our reader relate and understand the point of view that we have. After the first semester I felt like I had gotten better at writing. Writing has never been my best subject since I could remember so leaving first semester like I accomplished something like this was really amazing. When we got to the second semester some of the topics we discussed were identity, gender roles, Nature v Nurture and a couple more. We read novels like ‘The Surrogates’, ‘Persepolis’ and ‘As Nature Made Him’ and watched movies like ‘Gamer’ that introduced us on these topics.

            In the first essay of the semester we touched upon the topic of gender roles and how it’s present in our lives every day and every moment. I related it to the novel ‘The Surrogates’ and the film ‘Gamer’. I talked about how society has a major impact on gender roles because of the things that are put out there. There is the media who is constantly putting out magazines, television shows and many other things to tell the public how you’re supposed to dress, look and act on the depending on the gender that you fall into. We see it in the novel ‘the Surrogates’ with Victoria creating a male CEO so she can actually be successful because she feels she wouldn’t be with a female surrogate. We also saw it in the movie ‘Gamer’ in the two games ‘Slayers’ and ‘Society’. These games were created with the image of what a man should look like and what woman is perceived to look like and act.

            In the second essay we see the topic of nature versus nurture and the many ongoing arguments of this debatable topic. My main point in this essay is how many people agree that Nature plays a huge role in shaping a person’s identity but on the other hand many people think that Nurture is the main piece of the shaping of someone identity. I also based it off of the novel “As Nature Made Him” because the story of David presents this ongoing debate of Nature versus Nurture, on whether he could be nurtured as a girl because of his accident or can nature trump nurture and overrule his upbringing as a child. My essay ends with my own opinion of the debate and state that Nature is the one that trumps Nurture because one can’t simply nurture a child into a gender, when we are conceived we are assigned a gender.

            This year at CSUN has been fun, crazy and whole different experience and I probably wouldn’t change it for anything. Like I mentioned before I learned so much this year especially in my English class I can now say that I am a better writer than when I started my year here.