My name is Cynthia Balbi, I’m a freshman in college, enrolled at city college. I’m Dominican and bilingual. I believe that my personality has a lot to do with my writing. I believe I’m creative, outgoing, a giver, and fun. This helps a lot with my writing because I can come up with anything in free writing and extend the writing. Also, being a giver and outgoing pushes me to go to the max and at the same time giving it my all. With this class, I think I brought a lot to the table. Once my class did group work with a scenario of a zombie apocalypse and honestly, I brought a lot of good ideas to my group and helped them make the story more interesting. Moreover, the comfortability that the class gave me, I was also able to share some ideas with them and my opinions on topics that were spoken about. Some skills that have been built up would have to be the ability to communicate; everyone has been a good listener with me and has been giving me useful feedback. The power of observation; we did an observation fieldwork a while back. It taught me so much, such as observing our surroundings because we tend to become blind with what we have around us. I got to know a church and neighborhood inside-out. Just by observing places, I learn how to engage deeply with the people who were there and understand their perspectives from the outside of my tradition which is the best way to grow in my understanding of others and expand my view on it. I can say that these kinds of assignments have made me a better writer from before I walked into this class. It has been an eye opening because I learned that there’s more than one way to write and also there’s different types of writings. These types of methods have helped me grow and learn as a writer in my weakest areas. It has helped me with examining why something works or why an author may have decided to compose something with a specific goal in mind. Additionally, whether it’s improving my abilities as an author of image, discourse, or whatever I need. A few skills I also learned were problem-solving. When we were partnered up with other classmates we got to learn more about them. I would ask questions that would lead up to more closing questions. That’s when problem-solving came in. Questions such as why, how come, when, how helped to understand who they were, why they’re the way they are, and what caused everything. This relates to specific course outcomes because it has helped me grow as a writer, it’s given me answers, ideas, and skills. The number of materials I’ve learned in this course will help me in the future to be a good forensic scientist writer. The way I’ve managed to open up on paper is new and something that has been challenging to me. To this day I still get writer’s block but with some strategies I learned in this class, it has helped me grow as a writer. The strategies I learned were opening questions, free-writing, brainstorming, and outlines. With these new strategies I have challenged myself in different ways; such as writing on topics I’ve never written about. Stepped out of my comfort zone and done research on topics I’m not a big fan of. That turned out to be a good thing for me because I ended up with a new experience and I can say I’ve seek for growth as a writer.