Pathways to Becoming a Master Student, Unit 4

PROJECT 4: FINAL ESSAY

Kathy Rhodes

Kaplan University

CLA CS121-3

Stephanie Jensen

Dec 20, 2013

Throughout this course, Pathways to Academic Success, I have learned that I am far from alone in believing a lot of things I believed challenged only me! I was positive that no one else had as many self-doubts or insecurities that I had. The only student that was terrified about being able to succeed at this, or any other course. Time management was a joke in my world. Healthy living habits? What on earth were they? Eat right, sleep right, “exercise”? I knew that last one HAD to be a foreign word I had yet to discover the meaning of!

In this course I have learned to face my biggest fears, my own demons, and battle them head-on. I doubted week by week if I could mentally continue on, but yet I persevered. I learned new ways to approach subjects, to think about them, to analyze them, to learn them. I realized that my communication skills were poorly lacking in so many different ways! I learned more about diversity than I thought I ever would. I gained what I’m pretty sure will be life-long comrades. I’m not naive enough to believe that each and every person I’ve vowed to stay in touch with actually will, but I’m pretty sure there are 1 or 2 who are new parts of my life! I have learned in this course that I’m not the only person who doubted in my own abilities. I’m not the only person that said “online what”? All online courses, e-books? Oh my! New technology scared me to pieces but it didn’t scare me off. My determination to succeed by-passed even the quirkiest of the things I had which I dealt with.

The assignment was to identify five important, interesting, and/or valuable things I’ve learned through-out this course. To be honest, I don’t think I could possibly narrow it down to a mere five! Each week, each chapter, each seminar, assignment, discussion was so very important in its own merit. How could one part, or five, stand out more...