Initially I thought that I would dislike this class because we would have to volunteer and this was something I was not interested in doing. Getting the hours was fairly easy, as long as you were paired with a good organization, and I had a good time. I don’t really think I learned much by volunteering, we only had to volunteer for 5 hours and even though I did this I don’t think I got to spend enough time with the organization, nonetheless I had a very good experience. 

           I think the project that taught me the most was the mini ethnography, because it was sort of a research paper I was able to not only apply everything that I had learned about the organization but research something that had interested me. The other papers, essays, and journals we had previously written also helped me write this paper and it seemed like it was something we had sort of been building up towards. My favorite project to work on was the media campaign because it allowed us to practice different types of writing and we learned how to write different genre and target different audiences with our writing. I think my writing has improved over the semester because as I said before I know how to target different audiences and write using different methods.

            This class didn’t really give communities a new meaning but it made me realize their importance. Without communities everyone would have to work on their own to achieve their goals. Communities bring people together and put everyone on the same team, they give us the opportunity to try new things and meet new people. There are many ways that someone can become a member of the community and in this class it was by joining organizations that were part of the Tallahassee area. This class allowed me to become a member of the community in Tallahassee, before this I was mostly just a visitor attending school at Florida State.

            To any students that are thinking about taking this class I would say take it before 5 if possible, the only thing I ended up not liking about this class was that it went from 5 to 6. If I had to change anything about the class I think it would be to find some new organizations. A lot of my classes had a lot of difficulties doing a lot of the assignments because the organizations that they had been paired up with were not interested in cooperating by allowing the students to come in more often, or at all, or giving interviews and such. Even with the organization that I was paired with, I was able to volunteer but I was only given three possible dates that I could do it, if I couldn’t do it on one of these dates I probably not have been able to complete my 5 hours. I also think it took us a while to actually get into our writing, I could be wrong I have a bad memory, but I think it would have been better if we were assigned to our organizations early on and given more time to interact with them and learn about them. Also I don’t really know if the service contract was something that should be necessary, it’s a nice formality but for some people who did not volunteer much or only helped out at one big event it was sort of pointless.                       As much as I seemed to complain there were some things that I enjoyed about this class. I liked that we were given the opportunity to become a member of the Tallahassee community. I learned a lot about our community and how I could improve as a writer. I liked that we were encouraged to reflect on the things we had done and find a purpose to them. I also like the atmosphere in the class, everyone was pretty laid back and Ms. Lang was very helpful and encouraging. Overall this class exceeded my expectations and was a good learning experience.