Stephanie’s Blog

Criteria is used everyday to make decisions. Just by thinking about what you want to eat, you’re using criteria. It’s sounds like this in your head. “Hmmm I think I want pizza tonight, but that is kind of greasy. Then again salad sounds good. Yet, salad isn’t that filling.” Then you start to go into something along the lines of why you want each food and which one you want more until you finally come up with what you want to eat. Some decisions though aren’t really that easy.

Sometimes a big decision comes up, like which college are you going to go to after senior year of high school. That is the biggest decision that most people have to make. There are so many schools out there, how does a person narrow it down. Start by saying what you want the school to have, like a certain sport, or good restaraunts around campus. Does the school you want to go to have a campus you can live on or is it all apartments? Do you want it to be a religious school, or no religion involved. There are a lot to choose from. For example, when I decided to come to Bowling Green University, I was positive of my choice, but I’ve been thinking about it for years. See, my brother is four years older than me and he went to BGSU so I was always on campus or in his apartment/house visiting him. I knew what the neighborhood was like and what the school was like. I liked the school, but certain things worried me. Like all the parties and rapes that go on at BGSU. I didn’t want to be one of those girls that got raped or something. That is the only reason that I was leary on coming here. However, I want to be a teacher and they have one of the best teaching schools around. Having a child you don’t really have much options open also, so my son came into play a lot. I didn’t want to have to drive too far, and I knew I had to live at home. I knew I didn’t want to start at a community college and then transfer to BGSU, I just wanted to attend one college that way I wouldn’t have to bother with trying to transfer anything. Plus, I’ve had friends who have had problems transferring their credits and not all the credits transferred. After going through all of this, I decided that there was no doubt about it in my mind that BGSU was where I wanted to attend college. I used all of the above criteria to come up with my decision. Some people may throw some more criteria in there to come up with their decision. It all depends on the person on what criteria they look for. Criteria is used in everyday decisions whether we realize it or not.

     Coming into this course I am actually pretty confident on my writing.  However, I know that no one is perfect and there are areas that I need to work on.  Well, for starters, this is my first online course so I’m still getting used to figuring out how to do everything on here. Hopefully in a week or two I will have everything figured out so I will know exactly what I am doing. 

     There are actually quite a lot of things that I want to learn from this course.  I would like to learn how an online class works to see if I want to take another one or not.  Online courses would be more convenient for me, but who knows if I’ll understand everything or not. I’ll just have to wait and see. Also, I feel as if my writings are good; however, I know the areas that I need to improve on.  My conclusions to my paper always seem difficult for me to write.  Most people think it is the easiest part of the paper, but for me it is the hardest.  I never seem to know how to end my paper leaving my reader thinking about what I wrote about.  Also, my works cited page needs a lot of help.  I’m really bad at knowing how to cite sources, so I’m hoping that maybe I could get a better understanding of how to do that.

     The better parts of my writing are the body of the paper.  I just seem to get my papers flowing good from one idea to the next.  It just comes easy to me.  My introductions are also one of my strong points.  I wait until after I have finished writing my paper to write my introduction and that seems to be easier.  I just think to myself that if I was the reader how could the introduction pull me in. 

     From the instructor I expect to get criticism.  I want honest editing or reviewing to how my papers are coming along.  It really won’t hurt my feelings at all, I just want to know what I can do to better my papers.  Also, I would like help with taking an online course.  Since this is my first one, I will have a lot of questions and I just want to know that the instructor will be there to help answer them. Other than that, this seems like it’s going to be a very interesting course for me.