I went to my second essay class this morning and confidently handed in my homework. It's a short one-page response paper to the artile, "Getting In", we read in the last lesson. I did quite a good job in my first class, engaging in the lively discussion led by our professor Jill, and being complimented for the first short passage we wrote on class: a self-introduction. Other students focused on some details about their lives, what's their name, where they were from, what type of things they liked to do. Mine was talking more about growing up as a Chinese, beginning to compete with millions of other Chinese kids since little. After other students presented their passages, I found out how different mine was, and I started to get nervous. But Jill stopped me when I told her that I didn't know if the passage was really about self-introduction, and she told us that we should never give excuses about the things you've already written. So I presented my passage, and she said it was a terrific passage, and she liked the way how competition becoming the thread of my main ideas.

   Then we went on to talk about the article she handed out to us, and the homework for the first class was to write a summary of the main ideas of the article. I'd done pretty much work like this back in China, plus my active performance on class made me believe I could really do it right. Even my classmate started to ask if I could help him in shortening his summary, since his was far away from being brief.

   I used twenty minutes or so finishing the draft of my summary, polishing it for the next ten minutes, making in-text citation for five minutes, and went to the computer lab to print it out.

   Then at the end of today's class, Jill handed out our homework, and there it was, written in blue——"hand it on next Tuesday". And that's when I found out my in-text citation was all wrong (I wrote down the paragragh number instead of the page number), and I missed a page of citation attached to my summary.

   Back in China, I had never received any education on how to make citation. We copied things from printed or online resources, and handed them in to the teacher as if we did it. We didn't mean to commit plagirism, and our teacher simply didn't care.

   Thanks to the ignorance of Chinese education on that, I'll have to do my assignment all over again.

   As for other aspects of my academy life, I changed one of my previous courses: The meaning of Madness, to Law and Psychology. The new course needed four textbooks which cost sixty dollars in total, and we had to finish a four-hundred page book in two days (for me, since I registered late, it was one morning), and discuss the cases for the next class.

   I really do like the reading part, and the class discussion is really interesting. We have three professors teach us at the same time, and the class is divided into three groups. The three-hour class is divided into four parts, in the first and the last part all of the students have the lecture together, and the rest of the parts we do class discussion separately. This ensures the chances students have to be involved in the class.

    The first thing we were taught in Law and Psychology was crimial profiling. The first book we had to read,  Mindhunter, was a compile of criminal-profiling and catching stories a previous FBI agent had. Most of the cases were about serial-killer, and reading those cases really scared me sometimes. That's why all the girl who took this course in Thayer (the dorm I live in) slept together in one room at night.

   But I'm definitely enjoying the course, and those readings are interesting as well. 

   That's basically what I want to write for now, in the Widener Library, right after my class finished, and time to go for lunch.