My name is Fahmeda Akther. I am currently a sophomore at the City College of New York. I am planning on pursuing a major in biology. With a Bachelors Degree in Biology, I would like to apply for the Physician Assistant program at CCNY. My interest for health care and science came from noticing that no one in my family is pursuing a career in these fields. In my culture, the elders think that women do not need to be educated, since they will eventually become a housewife. However, my parents did not raise my siblings and I with this mindset. They have always told us to pursue what makes us happy and what we are passionate about.

I would like to show people that there’s more that a woman can do, than just take care of the family. Woman are independent and should be considered equal to men. My goal is to make my parents happy and make them proud of me. My goal is to accomplish everything that I am capable of doing and not letting anyone’s negativity bring me down.

Everyone makes mistakes but it is essential to learn from your mistakes. I don’t consider my failures a failure, but actually a lesson. Writing may not be my greatest strength, but I hope to learn as much as I can from this class and use this knowledge to prepare me for the future. There will be many times when I will have to create a proposal or a research paper and I know the skills from this class will be beneficial for me.

Each assignment had its own purpose and was unique in its own way. The assignments I enjoyed the most were the response papers. It forced me to read articles about topics that I might not have read about, and therefore would not have been informed about. For example, I had read an article about women eating their placenta. This seemed like a crazy idea to me, but I really enjoyed reading about it. One aspect that was difficult about the response papers was when we had to write about a podcast. This was difficult because there was such a variety of options in the science field. Also, the podcasts were quite long, so it took a while to listen to and then write about.

I also enjoyed writing the Informative Review. The topic I chose was rational suicide. This controversy had a lot of information to both sides, which made it so complex to look into. In addition, both sides had strong evidence which stumped me for a second to decide my position. As I did the research for this topic, I learned many new things, such as some laws that were created.

Since the research proposal was a group assignment, it wasn’t very difficult. Our group effectively communicated and this allowed us to break up the work. The presentation itself was difficult because I get very nervous speaking in front of everyone. However, it wasn’t as scary as presenting by myself.

The group research proposal lead to the individual research paper. I had a hard time writing this paper because I felt like we already said everything important in the proposal and in the presentation. This was a good thing and a bad thing because I already had all of the information I needed. Our topic was liver cancer in NYC and it increased my knowledge and awareness of the healthcare services that Asian Americans actually receive. There were several facts that I learned from this research assignment, which I would not have normally known.

Overall, I learned many new skills that will benefit me in the future. As I continue my education at the City College of New York, I know I will always be writing in most of the courses I take. This class has truly helped me improve my writing skills in writing an efficient thesis, paragraphs and much more. I grew as a writer. One thing I know I still need improvement on is public speaking. But with more practice, I will be comfortable in this as well.