Self-Reflection

Aisha J. Brownlee
12:10-1:00
Freshman seminar was an interesting class. At first I didn’t really enjoy it. I didn’t understand why we had to take the course and what I was supposed to gain from being in this class. I don’t particularly enjoy lectures but I did find some of the lectures interesting and others not as effective as they should have been. Either way, I believe that the lectures should have been more interactive, seeing as how the speakers needed to capture the attention of 100 freshmen at a time. Although they weren’t interactive, the lectures were great and sufficient examples of detailed research projects that each speaker undertook. The speakers provided information from different fields of study that gave the freshman class a perspective of Africans and research from different points of view. These lectures showed that intellectual research is essential to all fields of study and that research should be done for the good of the black community. Once research is done, it should be inscribed so it can be passed down to the next generation. This concept of inscribing and moving information to the next generation was stressed in all of the speaker’s lectures and is needed in the reeducation of blacks in the community. These lectures provided the class with examples as to how to go about undertaking research which was ultimately the goal of the course, to conduct intellectual research to contribute to the black community as well as others. My experience with the research project was essential to the rest of my academic growth at Howard. To learn how to do research is an important part of learning and is something that contributes to one’s intellectual development. Freshman seminar is vital for this reason, and provides us with the foundation to build on our research to continue the inscribing for the upcoming generations.