Literary Contest Ceremony

The past Wednesday, April 22, the English Department held the 48th Annual Literary Contest Ceremony. In this ceremony, the department presented the awards of students that participated in three different categories: poetry, essay and short story. Not only that, but this activity was also dedicated to the memory of Professor Mark Wekander.

For this contest, in my Journey in Literature class, my professor assigned everyone to submit an entry in whichever category we chose. To be completely honest, at first I thought that for it to be mandatory, it took away the appeal of it, because I didn't want to feel obligated to submit something that a panel of judges is going to critic and later on choose what they believed to be the best of them all. But, when I sat down to actually do it, it was fun! Truly, I knew I wasn't going to win, but it was a good and different experience to be writing for this type of contest.

In the ceremony, a professor greeted us all and introduced our host for the activity. Unfortunately I don't remember his name, but he was a true performer! He kept the activity alive and cheerful by almost acting and animating the things that he said. First off, he gave the prizes in the category of essays, and two of the girls from my class won! Marilú Crespo won first place and Ana Perez won third place, so congrats to them on their win! Plus, because she won first place, Marilú got to read her essay titled "Do Witches Get Financial Aid?" and it was great, just by the title we know that!

Professor Mark Wekander

After that, the professor that spoke at the beginning came back to the microphone to talk about Mark Wekander and some of his poems. Out of all the poems, the one that I liked the most was titled Lista. Lista is a poem about his neighbors' cat that died. One of the recurring themes in his poems revolves around the animals in our lives, and that is shown in this poem. It was evident to me that Mark was an astounding writer, and a very missed friend.

After this, the prizes in the category of poems were given. I didn't know any of the winners, but the girl that won first place read her poem and it was truly astounding! It was about how a writer is like a god and his poems are like his children. It was very intriguing and truly deserved that first place. Afterwards, the prizes for the short stories were given, but unfortunately, the girl that won didn't bring what she wrote, so we couldn't listen to her story. It was kind of disappointing, because it would've been great to hear it.

At the end of it all, the presenter bid us goodbye, but before we left, we were surprised with a salsa dance for the closing. It was really fun and the two students that danced were really great at what they were doing! Overall, I was afraid that the ceremony would be a little dull, but it was the complete opposite! It was very interesting, informing and entertaining, plus, it reminded us of the great people that have left us in this world, but his written work will never be ceased. It was an astounding activity that I will happily be attending next year.

Caged Paradise: The Experience

The past wednesday, April 15th, my class group and I were assigned to participate in a panel that would be running in the General Studies by the English Department. In this panel, we had to present the project that we had made for class a few weeks back on people's perception of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. Our presentation was titled Caged Paradise: A Web Based Research.



In this project we viewed and analysed comments and ads that were posted on the internet by what we denominated official and unofficial websites. The official websites consisted of tourism agency pages and more formal web pages, in other hand, the unofficial websites consisted of social media, yahoo answers, smaller blogs, and web pages of that matter. My part of the presentation consisted of the comments posted in social media by people around the world, mostly on Twitter and Facebook. In this analysis I came to the conclusion that at least in this two very popular sites people had a positive view of Puerto Rico's beaches and sceneries, but they had a bad perspective of Puerto Rican's and the criminality surrounding our island. Overall in our presentation, that was the entire conclusion based on what people commented on other sites and web pages.

My experience participating in this panel was very rewarding. In total there were four groups that would be presenting, and thankfully for me we were the first group to present. I say thankfully because truly, if other people came before me and gave their presentations, I would get more and more nervous as time passed by and I'd think that I wouldn't give a good speech up on stage, but I know that's just my mind over thinking things. Because we were first, we gave our presentation and I think I did a pretty good job explaining my part of the project and once I finished I felt good, like I'd done something right. I'm a dancer, and I love the feeling I get when I'm up on stage dancing and I know that people are there to see what is being presented, and I got that same feeling when I present my work in front of others that are there to see what conclusions I've made, and to maybe learn something new. It was a truly gratifying experience that has made my semester a little more interesting. 

That's me up on stage taking a bow!

Overall, this was a great experience for me to forget my nerves and speak about something that I knew what I was talking about. Plus, I have to admit that my group that gave this presentation with me was awesome, and we all did a good job. Truly, all four groups presenting were great, but I wouldn't change my team for any other! 

Journey Journal: An Internal Journey

For our Journey in Literature class we were assigned to keep a journal for eight weeks where we would write five times a week, that's a total of 40 entries, the first things that came to our mind. This journal would be our go-to place whenever we felt like venting, writing, speaking our mind or just looking for something to do in the meantime; it would be our guide through our internal journey. In those 40 entries we will be able to see the course of our thoughts while writing the first things that pop into our head. It is an exercise where we write and don’t stop writing to think of a particular detail to write about, we just keep our hand moving and our thoughts circulating in our heads. We can truly get a glimpse of who we are and we can do it by opening up to ourselves through writing.

          Since the beginning, we were given a total of 5 rules that we had to follow as we were writing in our journal, and we always had to keep them in mind. This rules said:

1. Don't crossout
2. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar
3. Don't think, don't get logical
4. Go for the jugular
5. Keep your hand moving

We always had to follow this rules, and at first it was a little difficult for me, because I am so used to writing and instantly checking for spelling or grammar errors and looking to correct them, but with this exercise I forced myself to not think of those. The first few entries I made where a little rough regarding the rules, but once I started to get the hang of it and I actually started to "not think", and my entries became very open and easy to do. 

On the first week my writing seemed very essay-like, like I was supposed to be writing a paper on a topic based on how my day was going or how I was feeling. When I started approaching the second week of writing, it became much more easier to write whatever popped into my head no matter how random it may seem, and as the weeks passed by, my entries became much more personal and truly resembled all of the thoughts that I had going on around my head, plus, it also helped me to actually organize all of those thoughts and be able to work with certain situations. Instead of writing for someone else to read and approve of, I wrote to please myself and to bear with everything going on in my life. Sometimes I would write very clearly and grammatically okay, but some days I would just scribble so much that the letters would mix together and the words would become a bit more difficult to read. Overall there were a lot of different types of entries, depending on my mood and the things that were going on and it became very easy for me to follow the "first thoughts" technique. 

When I started writing I would start with the thing that bothered me or impacted me the most. For example, one day in February I was really stressed out because I had my first Calculus 2 exam. I was so worried that I didn't study enough or that I studied the wrong thing that I literally started writing mathematical formulas in my journal. The funny thing is that I actually followed all the rules that were given to us at the beginning of the journal, I never stopped to actually think of any of those formulas, I just wrote them as I first thought of them and then continued with whatever I thought of next. After that I just kept on writing about other worries I had about other classes and a bit of personal stuff, but most of all I always came back to my Calculus exam and how worried I was for that. After finishing my journal I noticed that I felt a bit relieved for actually getting all of that out of my system, and I wanted to check if the formulas I wrote were correct, and they were!

In the end, I got to see that this journal was a great experience for me to connect with my inner-self a bit more. It helped me learn how to trust my thoughts and just go with whatever my mind felt like writing. It was a great way to be able to manage my thoughts and to talk about certain things that I wouldn't be comfortable talking about with other people. It showed me that there are little things that bother me in the day, and writing about them really helped me cope with some of them. I learned about myself, how proud I am of being Puerto Rican, how I'm a much more fluent writer in English than I thought I was, and how I deal with that internal journey that we all carry with us in our lives. It was a great exercise that I would recommend to everyone, because it truly helps us understand ourselves and situations regarding ourselves. I myself will continue writing in journals such as this one, it's a great way to learn about myself and to vent every once in a while when I need it.