15. What about summer?

What about summer?
I bought a sweatshirt with such label. And I like it very much because it makes my mood better.

As you could guess, I chose a topic of Ilya Sedov "What are you going to do in summer? Will you go abroad or stay at home? Are you going to work during the holidays?"

Well, summer is coming and it is the right time to think about your summer... exams. Ha-ha. That's a bad joke, I know!

Of course, it is the right time to think about your summer holidays and to decide what you are going to do for the whole 2,5 months.

As for me, I am going to take part in the summer school in Texas. I expect that it would be a great experience for me, because I have never been in America. I am looking forward to going there. I hope that we would not receive a lot of positive emotions bu also receive some knowledge about economics, American history and Finance. I think that three weeks spent there will be unforgettable.

Also I am hoping to go in Odessa in August. You know, Black sea is wonderful in August, and Odessa's suburbs are the right place to have a rest, enjoying the nature and the silence.

This summer I am not going to work, but I am planning to do so next summer!

I hope you would enjoy your summer vacations, and I say "Good bye" to you and wish you good luck, because its my last blog in this year, I think!

Yours,
Nadezhda

8. Topics for 8 blog

Here are my topics! Hope, you will enjoy them!

1. Which decade was the best in the history of music? What are you favorite artists of this decade? What are your favorite compositions and songs?

2. Do you love football? What football club you are a fan of? Why do you like it so much? What was the recent game your favorite club took part in like? Did you enjoy it?

3. Do you like the game "What? Where? When?"? Do you think that playing it develops your intellectual abilities or just train your memory when you learn different things that can help you to answer questions?

Post #15. This is The End.

Hello everybody!

Today I am writing my last *obligatory* post here! As my classes for English 201 end, my blog ends too. However, I do think about continuation of it after having some rest in the first half of January. But my aim today is not to tell you about my future holidays and plans but about the English 201. I want to kind of evaluate what have I learned, what I have still to improve and what are my goals in the next semester. Firstly, let me give a brief opinion about the course: it was really great, I liked it very much and I would definitely agree that you should not skip that course as there is a possibility to do so.

So, let me start from the things I really learned during that semester. Firstly, I really got used in writing different types of essays. That is the biggest and the most important knowledge I obtained. The most interesting thing is that I started using the knowledge I obtained here on another courses. It really helped me a lot. Also, that course was great for me for huge amount of teamwork and oral activity during the classes. I have always felt the lack of it during the education in high school and now I received just the needed amount of it. Finally, I liked the idea of final project presentations – I could do what I wanted to. And I did – I put all my efforts and *soul* into Pink Floyd presentation, because it is thing I really appreciate and value in my life.

Nevertheless, there are still some things I can improve. Firstly, my awful grammar. Some people say that mostly I do OK in that field, but I think I can do better. In my opinion, I can improve my grammar only through practice and communication with native speakers; actually, I am doing that at the moment. Secondly, although I studied a lot about the essays I am still having problems with the conclusion and the expression of my ideas. Conclusion may seem too general and uninteresting and the ideas – unclear. Again, I can overcome it with more practice, I decide.

Taking all the things above into account, my goals for the next semester are: to work on the problems listed below, to learn more about English literature. As you might know, in Russian schools the literature classes rarely cover some foreign books, as the result of the amount of Russian classical literature. However, that does not make English literature less attractive to me; it even becomes much interesting to learn something about it!

So, in conclusion, I would like to say a few words about my teacher, David Atterberry. I think he made a great work on improving our language! Especially I liked the comprehensive comments which he wrote about our each draft. That helped a lot, so, thanks a lot!:) I do not still know who is going to be my teacher in the next semester, but I will be happy to have David as a teacher again!

Thank you all very much for reading my blog! See you in the further posts!:)

Post #14. Learning to fly.

Hello everybody,

Today I would like to tell you about the thing that inspires me a lot during any life situation. That is the music of my favorite bands, Pink Floyd. In my opinion, they are one of the greatest rock bands which existed ever. Of course, you might disagree with me; however, it is hard to disagree that their music is very unusual, specific and unique. Moreover, their music is quite diversified from one album to another, from one song to other. Sometimes the style varies even in one single song.  It really captures my attention a lot! The music of Pink Floyd helps me to achieve two main goals:

·         Firstly, it really helps me to feel relaxed. That is really important, as I could either just sleep with Pink Floyd on the background or just do my home assignments in a relaxing atmosphere. Of course, I do not claim that all of their music creates such an atmosphere, but the vast part does.

·         Secondly, it sometimes helps to reflect, to think about yourself and your relations with other people and with the whole society. I know that it sounds very philosophical, but it is really important for me to experience some thoughts like that.

Pink Floyd caused the great impact on psychedelic rock from the all sides. Actually, they were the first group ever to adopt such a genre. Also, I do very like how they combined classical rock with psychedelic in some compositions. That combination allowed them to touch a lot of issues in their music, starting from social problems and ending with deep psychology. Many groups afterwards adopted such unwritten standard of music creation.

Pink Floyd was also innovative by their use of electronic and semi-acoustic synthesizers and other semi-electronic musical instruments. That allowed them to create the famous effect of ‘space wind’ which still fascinates thousands of fans around the world.  I completely agree with them, I did not another group with such an amazing sound. You can feel it especially if you are listening Pink Floyd on the old vinyl tapes – I still have some. 

Actually, I do not want to write a lot about the group today, here, as I am going to do my final presentation project about them. Thus, if I write a lot now, I will have nothing to say at the presentation. J However, I at least decided to compensate the length of my post with some pictures and music, related to the topic, so I hope you enjoy it!

                                                            

The picture in the beginning of post is from the 'Dark Side of The Moon' album.

Moreover, while I was writing that post, I was listening to the following tracks:
Pink Floyd - High Hopes
Pink Floyd - On the Run
Pink Floyd - Mudmen
Pink Floyd - Us and Them
Pink Floyd - Another Brick in The Wall (Part I)
Pink Floyd - Julia Dream

Post #13. Argumentative essay critique.

Hello everybody,

Today’s post will be related to one of the recent formal writing assignments that I did for my English 201 course. Actually, it was an argumentative essay. Of course, I have used to write the same type of essays, but in Russian only and I did not fully understand the explicit structure. However, we spend a lot of our time in class discussing all the structure and model of development for argumentative essay, so I was quite confident when writing it. We were given 3 different topics, but none of them suited me, so I decided to write to David, asking whether I can take a different topic or not. David submitted my topic choice, so I have written an essay, answering the following question: “Should piracy on the Internet be banned or not?” That might sound strange, but I was protecting the piracy legalization for the several reasons. Actually, I am not going to talk about these reasons right now, but about the pluses and minuses that I have encountered in my paper.

Firstly, I would like to talk about my essay’s minuses. Of course, I managed to fix some of them in my second draft; however, some remained. What I am talking about:

·         I don’t really like the sources I have used. Of course, before integrating each source I used CRAAP test methodic to identify the accuracy of the source, but it seems confusing to me, that I have not used any books, only some articles. However, I think it is because the topic I covered is not really shown in contemporary literature.

·         The conclusion of my assignment is quite simple. I think it definitely can be improved, but it is my usual problem – by the end of the essay I become tired and empty of new ideas to implement, for instance, in my memorable statement.

·         Also, I am not sure that I have good grammar and mechanics, although I double-checked everything and fixed some places, which seemed wrong to me.

Nevertheless, I can’t say that my essay is completely bad – it also has some features, which seem pluses to me:

·         Firstly, the topic I have chosen is very actual for everybody today. Moreover, the position I have chosen, is quite unusual, so I decide that for readers it will be quite interesting to read my essay.

·         My attention getter in the beginning is a story based on my personal experience. I have noticed previously that story types of attention getter are often quite interesting for the readers and I do not think this essay is going to be an exception.

·         Apart from that, I decide that I have made quite a good research on MLA standard and designed the Works Cited page and parenthetical references correctly.

In conclusion, I would like to say that my essay is quite good from my point of view and I hope it will receive an adequate markJ

Post #12. The season and the weather

Hello everybody,

Today I would like to talk about the simple but cute topic: my attitude to different times of year and to different types of weather. Actually, roughly every season has its own weather, but it might of course be biased during the time of the year. Also, very often the same weather conditions occur in different seasons. Sometimes, it may seem unrealistic, but I clearly remember one of the ends of the December (I think it was 2009), when it was so hot, that even mushrooms had grown in the forest and new leaves started to appear. What I am trying to say is that I actually can’t directly state that I have clearly one favorite season. It depends on the weather very much. Also, in this post I want to focus on winter, because it is “in office” now and discussing that season is much more actually than discussing others.

So, although I have chosen winter as the main thing to discuss, I want to start from the ongoing season, spring. For me, only the last part of spring is pleasant, as in the end of the May it is usually the best weather we can ever have, in my opinion. +20 degrees Celsius, light slow wind, partly sunny sky – ideal weather for physical and mental activity. Also, during such weather I mentioned that it is really sleeps better.

Of course, sometimes everybody prefers sun and hot weather to the weather described above. For those moments, I do love summer. Sometimes, it is really warm and even hot in the summer in the Russia. For instance, I remember that I and my friends were even swimming in the local lake, and the water temperature was pretty high.

The only two advantages that I see in the autumn are that there is very short period of time, when the weather is the same as in the spring. The second advantage is that I have my birthday in the September. From the other sides, I do not see any advantages in autumn: unpleasant weather, great amounts of homework, dark evenings and depressive thoughts.

So, that leads to the main time of the year I want to discuss is, of course, winter. I can’t say that it is my favorite time of the year, but winter has its unique sides, which makes it sometimes beautiful. The first thing about winter that I do like is the great amount of snow. The snow makes everything looks very different from its usual view. Especially, it is notable in the Moscow gardens. If you compare two photos of the same garden in the winter and in the summer, you might think it is another place. It is just seems impossible how such a green place could become such a white place.

Also, there is the greatest holiday in the winter – The New Year! I know, that for people from Western world it might sound odd, as they have the X-mas as the major holiday. However, in the means of winter enjoyment, I decide that we can assume those holiday quite the same ones.

So, I can talk a lot about winter, other seasons and weather but I think I had already bored you. Here is another important thought: I do not think about such things just because they are simple and easy to discuss. It is because it seems a way to relax and enjoy myself in that way.

Post #11. Internship problems.

Hello everybody,

Today I would like to talk about the problem of internship during the pre-graduate or post-graduate period in the contemporary world. I think that that topic is very actual for everybody, especially for us, students, as we are going to face the same problems in a couple of years or less. So, the two main issues of internship are whether to pay for it or not and whether to do it or not at all. Does it really effective and worth to spend your time and powers on it, or not?

I have recently read two interesting essays on this topic, “Take This Internship and Shove It” by A. Kamenetz and “No Pay? Many Interns Say, “No Problem” by J. Halperin. These two essays have a slightly different point of view on the problem of paid or unpaid internship. In the first one, author states that in the USA the division between paid and unpaid is about 50/50. However, she states that unpaid internship has two main disadvantages: firstly, unpaid internships create a lot of literally free labor, which is a contribution to corporate welfare of companies. Of course, it might seem good for companies; nevertheless it is also seem like exploiting workers. The second disadvantage is that unpaid interns have fewer incentives to work more effectively. Here, I do completely agree with Kamenetz. Unfortunately (or fortunately), money is greater incentive than new knowledge, which could be earned during the internship. And great international financer W. Easterly wrote: “People respond to incentives”. That thought is simple and genius: the greater incentives person has - the more effective he or she would do.

On the contrary, in the other essay by Halperin, opposite thought is stated. She says that unpaid internship is very good, better than paid. However, she heavily relies on the couple opinions of the students what did not sound as a strong argument for me. It can be explained quite easily: if we apply some rule (in our case the rule would be that paid internship is good) to the set amount of people, we will always encounter some deviation from that rule. The bigger that amount is, the bigger the deviation is. So, if we take into account that there are huge amount of interns among the U.S., we could easily find some people who do not agree with the rule. But the majority disagrees, and that is the key decision.

Personally, I have never met a single person who would agree to do an unpaid internship. Notice: I do not consider paid internship being rewarded explicitly by money. The reward could be also something like recommendation letter or some other document. In my mind, those things worth much more than just money. Just a short example from my life: before entering NES, I was working as an intern in insurance company. Formally, it was a paid internship, because I received some money every month. But that amount was literally nothing, and the greatest reward was an official recommendation letter which allows me to continue my future career without internship again.

Of course, you may have another opinion on that issue and it would be interesting to hear it J