Blog 1: Student Profile

Hey everyone!

I am Chantanna Gholar and I am a senior Human Resource Management major. Well, I usually LOVE writing until I came to USM. In high school and at the junior college I attended, I (in my instructors opinions) delivered superb papers, but here it's not the same. I am able to write about things that I understand better than things that I'm not interested in. On papers I've written in classes within my major, I've made A's and B's but in other classes (history, sociology, etc), I made very few A's, bit of B's, but more C's. It bothers me that I'm not able to apply my writing technique to other subjects other than the ones I'm interested in (anything related to business, marketing, human resources, etc). I believe that it's because other things don't spark my interest. For example, I am interested in the research of the relationship between an employee's behavioral change between home and work. Last fall, I took MGT 454 (which is Organizational Behavior). I completed a project that consisted of a mini-textbook (almost 70 pages) along with a 90-slide PowerPoint. I passed that assignment with a 91 but this past spring I completed a 3 page paper on the Declaration of Independence and I made a 75 on it. I would like to have superb writing skills amongst any subject, not just subjects within my major or business-related. My goal is to make an A in this class. I really hope that this class helps me to somehow find a connection between things that interest me and things that don't. I love writing because it's a form of helping me express myself. A person's writing technique depicts small things about their personality. In addition to writing, I also love reading other people's work (especially articles and opinion-based documents). One thing that worry me about this course is the grading. It's almost impossible for an instructor to grade a paper based on factual information only. In classes like this, the grading is so important because it consists completely of papers and some of which that are not going to be completely factual. How do you grade an opinion-based paper? Or a partial opinion-based paper?

But overall, I am hoping to make this class a wonderful experience and even more, I hope to somehow learn how to be able to deliver superb papers regardless of the subject.


Thank You!