All the way from the very beginning, I knew that California State University, Monterey Bay was going to be the right place for me. The first day I came onto campus for a tour, I felt a connection; a connection that has stuck with me all the way through my first semester as a college freshmen. Whether they are bad or good, I have learned many lessons along the way.
College is a huge adjustment for a person to make. As a student it is a big jump, because the course difficulty is definitely harder, whether it be a little or a lot, the difference is significant. The day before my classes started, I went around to each building to find the room where my course was located. The first day of class was very nerve racking, but it was good to get it under my belt. Taking the first step was important for me in terms of adjusting to my new environment. I feel like I have made big changes in my academic career since August. I now have a major set up (Liberal Studies), so I have my classes picked out for the next few years. Knowing that I have this path set up for me has helped me to focus, because having something to look forward to and work for is definitely a drive for me.
Another big adjustment that I had to make was living with another person. My roommate, Farrah, happened to be a very good match. We get along great, but as everybody knows, if you are with someone for too much time, things begin to get messy at times. Sometimes there are disagreements, but you don’t have mom and dad there to help you out, so you must work things out on your own. One thing that I definitely learned to be the most important rule is to never start a fight with your roommate. Sit down and talk things out, but never, EVER start accusing them of things that you aren’t sure whether or not they did. If you do that, things can get very messy. Since you have to live with the person whether or not you like it, its best to keep things clean. It’s important to talk to my roommate if I realize that she is doing something that I don’t really like, or if something that she does bothers me. We talk about our feelings and our problems, and this makes our living space a happier and healthier living space for the both of us.
Another thing that I learned from living with another person is to be considerate of their feelings. Be respectful of their living space, because even though it my room, it is also theirs. This means that I have to watch what I do, so I make the space live able for the both of us.
I have learned to put myself out there. Meeting new friends and developing a relationship with people is something that comes very easy to me, but this June at orientation, it was kind of a wake up call for me. I realized that I was really going to have to loose all of my shy feelings and just throw myself into the sea of anxious freshmen. When I did this, I met a lot of the friends that I now spend time with. If I had not decided to do this, I wouldn’t have met some of the great people that I really admire today. I am socially more mature than I was in high school. I like college much better than high school because everybody is very accepting. In high school, people make judgments faster about other people, but I saw college as a fresh start; a chance to meet completely new people and start over completely.
I have also learned not to judge any book by its cover. All people have an equal chance at everything in life. I already knew this, but I definitely put it into effect during this school year. I opened my heart and mind to all people, and it helped me to have a better experience. It has definitely been life changing.
Being independent is another important life skill that I developed along the way. Although I was pretty independent at home before I left for college, moving to Monterey and living completely on my own has definitely helped me grow as a person. Being able to do whatever I want whenever I want was definitely a big change, and it was nice for me especially in the beginning. As other people started to skip classes, I realized that independence definitely comes with consequences if you do not use it correctly. Although it was nice for those people to not have their moms forcing them to go to class, they were failing in return. I decided to keep going to class, because I knew if I missed one , it would turn into a bad habit and I would end up never going to class again. Making these decisions on my own helped me realize that I can make the right choices and still have fun. Although I have never skipped a class, I can still manage to have all the fun I need and maintain a good grade point average.
I feel like overall, California State University, Monterey Bay has offered me a handful of skills, both academic and personal, that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I feel like I have reached many of the course outcomes not just from being in the class, but from gathering information from all of my resources here at Cal State Monterey Bay. I have definitely added more to my knowledge about how to maintain and balance a good education, but also to have fun and live your life. College is an experience that everybody should get to live, and although some people don’t , I am trying to make the best of my experience here.
Social Network Responses The course outcome that social networking relates to is "Diversity, Identity, and Differing Perspectives." There is a relationship there that allows the individuals to express their personal identity and observe diversity among others. There are many course outcomes to this class, and the project that we picked (Social Networking) combines many of these together. Academic skills is something that is important in social networking because there is a lot of work that goes behind the scenes that people don’t know about. The diversity is important because people can express themselves through social networks. We all decided that we wanted to do social networking as the focus for our group because social networking are part of our every day lives, and we wanted to learn more about them and how they help or take away from us. We all (Brooke, Julia and Laura) use facebook on a daily basis, which is a very popular social network. OUR definition of a community is: People who live close or together and work together to make the place that they live a better place to be. A social network can also be an academic community. It is a group of people all doing the same thing and working with the same goals and ideas. On Merriam-Webster Dictionary online, it defines a community as a unified body of individuals. When you combine that with the word "academic" you get a group of people working together in an academic way. Hamman’s Definion : (1) a group of people (2) who share social interaction (3) and some common ties between themselves and the other members of the group (4) and who share an area for at least some of the time. Summary of Social Network Theory: “A social network is a social structure made of individuals (“nodes”), which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency such as friendship, kinship, sexual relationships, beliefs, knowledge or prestige,” (diigo.com). “Nodes” are the individual actors within the networks and “ties” are the relationships between the actors. So basically, the nodes are the people who are participating in the social network and the ties are the reasons that they are involved. In the 1930’s, social networks began to really take off. J.L. Moreno studied small social networks like classrooms and work groups while a group of Harvard students studied a group of interpersonal relations at work. There is a program called Social Network Analysis (SNA) and it is used for mass surveillance. They used it to examine whether or not US citizens were political threats and to study patterns of how HIV and AIDS are spread through social networks. The power of social networks is very great and can be useful with many different aspects of our world today. Social Networks and Group Formation: Social networks are one of the most crucial things in internet and design. They are used in society, the workplace, and for technology. The first social networks were researched in the late 1940s. Mark Granovetter and Linton C. Freeman were two people that published two important articles before the big internet boom. They wrote about social networking and how they believed whether it was based on weak or strong ties. Centralization in a network is something that is also very important. Degree of a point, control and independence are three very crucial things to have in a network. Knowing these things is very important in modern WebPages and sites. Researchers recognize that humans becoming able to make individual choices and ideas affect the progress and changes of a network. Keeping this in mind, a person could apply social networking towards a web creation, but since it is based on human systems it would be hard to predict the outcome of the network itself. Physical Place and Cyber Place: “Computer networks are social networks.” Computer supported social networks bringing more people together. Our world functions in networks, whether it is simply one person to another or even in the larger business companies. Social networks are giving people an opportunity to communicate with a larger range of peers. Communities now have less boundaries and more people involved. People and companies are also able to connect with more than one group, which allows our networks to grow. E.M. Foster examined the opportunities and transformations afforded by communication networks that are computerized. There are many positives to computerized communication networks such as, broader bandwidth, wireless portability, globalized connectivity, and personalization. Yet, there are also negative aspects to it such as, increased surveillance and less privacy. Through computers, our local communities are going beyond the neighborhood. People are now able to communicate with one another no matter where they are at. The Machine Stops by F.M. Forster discussion and our academic community with no "Machine": The Machine Stops by F.M. Forster is a story about a mother, Vashti, and son, Kuno, who live on the opposite sides of the world due to almost the entire human population living underground in cells. Each person lives in a small cell where their whole life is lived through a machine. There is not very much face-to-face interaction because they communicate through the technological world. Very few people live on the surface of the earth because they have adapted to living with dependence upon this "Machine." The biggest conflict through out the story was that people became so dependent on this "Machine" that they lost their technology knowledge and began to ignore all flaws of the "Machine." Soon, the machine begins to crash and nobody has the knowledge to fix it. If we lived our world with no machine, our academic community would slowly crash. As new generations came along, we would lose all knowledge in the technological sense. We would also lose our common sense of how to greet one another face-to-face and family traditions would soon deteriorate due to dependence on this "Machine." Our world would simply become a place where people do not live through their hearts, but through a machine.
LINK to Personal Pages and Blogs: Julia Matthews https://sites.google.com/a/csumb.edu/julia-matthews/about-me http://jmatthews91.blogspot.com/ Brooke Keith https://sites.google.com/a/csumb.edu/brookemarie/ http://brooke-keith.blogspot.com/ Laura Bockman https://sites.google.com/a/csumb.edu/laura-bockman-s-site/
CITATIONS: Singh, Shiv. September 9, 2007. Social Networks And Group Formation. http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks
Definition of "community" found on Merriam Webster's Dictionary Website http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/COMMUNITY
Forster, E.M.. 1909. The Machine Stops.
Wellman, Berry. Febuary 2001. "Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Personalized Networking." http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/%7Ewellman/publications/individualism/ijurr3a1.htm
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