A Happy and a Busy Week:)

This week was such a fast week for me.

The first important thing about this past week was of course the Comm 101 essay! We were supposed to hand in our first drafts on wednesday at 9.30 am- and again it was very stressful especially after a long break:)

But no matter what- I did hand in my paper on time.

What I realized this week is that I really like the things we are doing for this class. For instance the topic is very intriguing, especially for us youngsters:)

We use the internet everyday, and "having a date" and "cheating" is a very daily thing for us students, so this class really attracts our attention- or i can say at least it does grab MY attention.

Audiobook was such an interesting experience also- cause i never listened to a book from the internet before.

Half an hour ago, I got out of my math midterm. I was very hopeless about it because i didnt go to any of the classes and i learned whats going to be on the exam last night. But a very close friend of mine helped me to figure out the matrices, limits and the derivatives. and it went all good:)

Now we'll go out to Taksim any celebrate it!

:)

Holiday

Wow- so here I am writing after a long break:)

I was really looking forward to this holiday, because school was really tough this past week, and i was thinking that I needed to get a rest. 

This Bayram Holiday was full of family times! Our aunts and cousins came from Istanbul and we were such a cheerful and a crowded family- but I liked it:)

I spent most of my time with the family and I had 2 nights to be with my friends, and of course that wasn't enough for us, since we had too much stuff to catch up with our lives.

I left Izmir on friday afternoon to go to Istanbul because we were planing on going to Nil Karaibrahimgil's Concert in Babylon but unfortunately it was canceled because her drummer has died. -you might have heard about it, he was İlhan Şeşen's son.

But we as the same group didnt give up and went to other places in Taksim and had a great weekend:)

Lets see how this week will go for me..

Week11

This week in our communication class, we received back our feedbacks and grades of our Essay1. We also got back other people's feedbacks about our podcasts. My essay grade disappointed me a bit, but it's OK since I now learned the parts which did wrong and hopefully I won't repeat the same mistakes in our Essay2. The school was really taugh this past week and also during the weekend because my midterms are approaching and so as the Comm101 stuff that we have to do for EVERY next class. Tomorrow I have a sociology midterm, so I better get on studying- and OH we have an essay exam tomorrow about the Love Online text in Comm101. Hopefully these two exams will go alright tomorrow!:)

Final Drafts Due

So.. Here is the review of this past week..

This week was probably the hardest week of all the communication class so far. Our Final draft was due to wednesday; so everyone was in a hurry of fixing everything and rearranging their ideas and paragraphs because Mr. O'Regan was so strict about his rules. He told us that he will not even accept the essay if he finds an error which we forgot to fix from the feedback that he has given us.

He sometimes stresses me out:)

So, I have finished writing and editing my essay on tuesday night; and of course I had a problem printing the essay again! My parents surprised me by getting me a MacBook last week, so the whole week I was busy with trying to discover the features of the computer. But I never thought that I would have a trouble while taking a print out. Everytime I was clicking on print; it was printing only the one fourth of the page but in a bigger font. So at 1 am, I gave call to a friend and he came and helped me to figure out what was wrong...

I think I have some very good friends:)

2007's Instructions

I have written my essay, submitted it to turnitin.com, took a print out of the essay and also the instruction page. When I came to class I was feeling comfortable, because I was thinking that I have done everything that I was supposed to be doing. 

But I could never imagine the sillyness that I did the other night. Accidentally, I opened the Instruction page for 2007 and wrote my whole essay following the 2007's instructions.!!! So I used quotations in every body paragraph and even in the introduction of the essay:)

Now I'm laughing because I have fixed everything, but at the time I learned what I have done, I was absolutely terrified!

I figured out that we were supposed to do paraphrasing instead of quoting. 

So I had to change a lot from my 1st Draft.

It was hard, but at least I have learned to be more careful when I'm looking at a instruction page:)

Week 8

This week in COMM101 class we were told that our 1st Drafts were do for next week- I think the article that Mr. O'Regan has given us was a bit confusing and difficult to understand. But I'll do my best in understanding the article:)

As the time goes on the classes get harder and harder . And especially the COMM101 class!

In the essay we are supposed to somehow criticize the techniques that Tom Tyler uses in order to be convincing about the claim that he's giving. After class, I went to my dorm and looked at CH5 in the handbook and couldn't actually found what I was looking for. It talks very briefly about the convincing techniques.

Lets see how I will do on my first draft...

week 7

So here was the most stressful week of college!

I had two midterms this week : one was psychology and the other was sociology

Since I'm a psychology student, I tried to do my best in this class.

But the bad thing was= psychology midterm was on friday night and the other was in saturday morning!!!

I started to study on tuesday night for psychology. But there were 10 Chapters that I had to review and it was too much memorizing so I spent all 3 days doing my Psychology Study.

And I was bommed about Sociology because I could only study for it on Friday night after the Psych 100 exam. As you can understand I was exhausted that night. 

Psychology exam was OK but the Sociology was absolutely terrible!!

On the weekend my friends from Izmir came to visit us; so I spent the rest of the weekend showing them around and taking them to some pretty places in Istanbul.

It was a tough week but a happy weekend!

And that's the most important thing:) 

It was quite a disappointing week in COMM101 this week. On wednesday morning's class, i was 5 mins late to class, and when I got in there was an arguement going on between us students and our instructor Mr. O'Regan. It didn't take me too long to understand what the issue was. Mr. O'Regan was pretty disappointed because non of us but only one student answered the questions about the text that we have read. I can honestly understand Mr. O'Regan's situation, but I guess all of our minds were pretty busy about the podcasts which was also due for Wednesday. I don't know about other people, but it took me so long to prepare that podcast because
#1- I had to learn how to use photoshop- i thought it would be fun to learn photoshop!
#2- I'm not very smart in using the technology.
And since I wanted to make my podcast very good, I spent much energy and time on it.
But still.. I couldn't figure out how to both record my voice and put a song as a background music.
So what I'm planning to do is, during the presentations, I will open the podcast and open my song separetely and play them at the same time...

Hopefully it will be accepted.

Summary&Articles

This past week in our COMM101 class, we discussed about how a proper summary would look like. As a homework assignment, we were supposed to write the DOs and DON’Ts of a summary, so that way everybody could come prepared to class, and everyone of us would have a point to add to that list on summary. It was quite fun to do that list, because this time Mr. O’Regan paired us up , and i met some new people. As you can easily understand, yes, i do like making new friendsJ
And this week, the instructor gave us another article to read from our “booklet”(!). This time it’s only 10 pages, hopefully this one will go faster.
Another thing which I remember about this past week’s classes was the moment that Mr. O’Regan reminded us about the due date of our podcasts!!!! Its next Wednesday, which is only in 3 days. I have to hurry up because i stil have some topics about the topic that i chose. Plus, I stil couldn’t figure out how to video-tape the computer’s screen without using a video camera. Cause one of my friends told me that there is actually a program which records the pc’s screen when you are doing something on it. I really have to hurry up…

This past week in our Communication class, we were supposed to read a text from our booklet- which was a pretty hard one. It was kind of hard for me because of the difficult words in it. It took me so long to finish reading it because I had to look up the meanings of so many words...

Then, in the class on Monday, Mr. O'Regan gave us back our feedbacks on the essays that we have written before the bayram holiday. Mine was not as bad as i was expecting it to be,  even though i misunderstood the second part of the question. Lets see how things will go this week... 

*Şeker* Bayram

So, here I am, writing from my dorm-room again:)
Which also means that the vacation is over - and we are all back to school.
I came back to Izmir right after school on Friday and spent Friday night and Saturday with my family and friends. Even though most of my friends from highschool were not there, (b/c they go to college in the states) i got a chance to see my friends who go to college in Turkey. It was so wonderful to see them again, because this time all of us were full of the excitement of living outside of our hometown and going to college. So we had many things to share with each other. We were all experiencing the similar things; such as getting used to our new school, meeting new people and making friends starting from the very beginning. As we all told our stories, there was something which really made me feel releved - even though we were all going to different colleges in different cities, we are all living the same experiences and feeling the same emotions.

On Sunday morning, we started our trip to Asos. We were there with our family friends, and just like the many other trips we took together, we knew that this vacation was also going to be a great one! On the day that we arrived to Asos, the weather was kind of cold and rainy, so we didn't get to do much. We spent the night in the hotel- and I think it was better because there were many things to talk with Ece and her family. Since they live in Istanbul, we don't get to see each other much, other than these kinds of trips that we plan together.
Oh yeah, i forgot again, I also live in Istanbul! :)

In the second, third and fourth day, we went to Kaz Dağları, and Bozcaada, and we absolutely loved those places. In Kazdağları, I felt like I was in a place where the time has stopped. There were many little villages with houses made of stones and the nature and the weather made me feel in peace. Especially going to these kind of calm and peaceful places, after living in big-crazy-cities make you take more from these places.

We came back home on Thursday night, and on friday i saw some friends that I couldn't see last week, and spent some good time with them. The next day, my mom & I went shopping for some warm clothes, since the winters in İstanbul are way more colder than the winters of Izmir.
And on Saturday night, we had a family reunion in my grandparents' house and we celebrated "my grandma's birthday" and "my coming back home":) We always have fun in these kinds of dinners, I don't know- maybe because we are a very fun and happy family:)

now i better go to sleep, otherwise I will fall asleep tomorrow in COMM 101 and Mr. O'Regan will poke me in the eye:)

JK!

Nil

First Two Weeks of KU

The end of highschool, end of childhood, and the first step to college..
With the complicated feelings of all these factors, here I am sitting in my very first class, Comm 101.
At first, when I checked my schedule and saw the course's name as "Communication", I had no clue that it actually was an "Academic Writing" Class. So, it was a little bit horrifying to figure it out in the class.
My first opinion about this course is that, it's very similar to my English Course in ACI. (American Collegiate Institute-Izmir) But of course, it's much more complex and creative. For instance, we've never done something like writing a blog or creating a Podcast. However, in ACI we were also supposed to choose our Project & Essay topics by ourselves. I believe it's much more better than doing what your instructor asks you to do.
In the second class, Mr. O'Regan told us to choose a topic to do our podcasts on. Truly, creating a podcast really frightened me because there are two main things that I hate about myself.
#1- hearing my voice from a voice recorder
#2- watching myself in a video-record.
So, I have to figure out a way to get rid of these fears of mine...

About the bayram holiday... We are going to see Asos and Gökçe Ada with a very good friend of mine, and her family. So I'm pretty excited about this trip, because I've never seen these places before and people keep telling me about how beautiful these places are.
I'm looking forward for the Bayram Holiday:)
Lets see how things will go!