Jackie Jaramillo

Professor Koning
English 113b
5.04.2014

Author Statement Draft
Hi, my name is Jacqueline Jaramillo I am a freshmen here at CSUN. I am part
of Professor Kelans English 113b. I am also a part of the Cheerleading team here as
well. I am 18 years old and I am a Child and Adolescent Development Major. I plan
on being an Elementary School Special Education teacher and latter pursuing my
dream of starting my own charter school for children with Autism.
During my class search fall semester I came across tree English 113b classes
that complimented the rest of my class schedule. Like most college student I looked
up each teacher on Ratemyprofessor.com, I saw some good and not soo good things
being said about all three of the professors for those classes. The next day I walked
into my academic advisors office and asked for his opinion on whom I should take.
He said Jacqueline those are not the only classes that fit your schedule, there is a
few 8am classes that fir your schedule as well. I recommend you to take Kelan
Koning, I have heard nothing but good things about her as a professor and as a
person. I have even had students tell me she is worth waking up at 6 am to come all
the way from LA to take her class. I decided to take Kelan and I feel that I made the
right decision.
Kelans class consists of a lot of homework. The homework is not busy work;
it makes the process of writing a paper easier. For each paper and essay we have
about three assignments before the final draft. We have a Sunday assignment where
we pick our topic. We also have a prospectuous that includes some research on our
topic and a thesis statement. Then we have our first draft due for peer review. We
get to give 5-6 of our classmates peer review to help them with the final draft of
their paper. Writing a paper is still one of the hardest things in the word for me, but
doing those assignments before writing the final draft helps.
Because of my Project Space paper I learned to write and ethnography. The
student had assignments leading up to the final daft. We visited the two places we
would be comparing and contrasting in our papers. For my paper I chose to write
about two malls The Northridge Fashion Center and The Topanga Shoppingtown.
Some of the struggles I faced writing this paper were getting my thought together,
finding credible useful research on the two malls and arranging my argument in my
paper. I had a two tutoring sessions both at the LRC and the Chicano Writing Lab to
help get my paper together, which really helped.
Project Text was more of an essay paper, but I felt like I was writing a
research paper, that confused me. My topic was The Occupy Movement, which was
interesting because I had no idea what the Occupy Movement was prior to writing
this paper.