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At the beginning of this course, I was a little shy to start participating fully in class discussions and trips. I didn’t know the other girls too well yet, and I’m always a little afraid to go up to someone and make friends with them. But I feel like I ended up going above and beyond what I had expected of myself. I found myself participating fully and without prompting. I became very good friends with the girls in the class, and now they’re a big part of my life here at Bryn Mawr.

Playing in the city itself taught me such valuable lessons. I learned how to look at others, including those who are complete strangers, and read their mood. I can tell who’s having fun and who’s just trying to get through until the next day. It took me a while, but I realized that being able to do this is actually a reflection of my critical thinking skills being honed. I can now look at almost anything, I feel, and be able to read deeply (and academically) into it.

The greatest thing that happened to me all semester was learning about deep play. As soon as I read about it and figured out what it meant to me, I found myself looking back and seeing things that I’ve done that are reflections of deep play. I think that the concept of deep play may be the most relevant thing to real life that I’ve ever gotten from a classroom.

Of course, not everything is this class came with the joys that deep play did. Many things I found very difficult for a while, like the process of writing critically (which I now realize was never required from me in high school, where I automatically got good grades without trying). I could always think critically, but I could never quite get my thinking logically onto paper. At the risk of repeating my mid-semester evaluation, I’d like to stress how much the idea of writing around my thoughts has helped me. I don’t stress as much if I cannot immediately find the words for what I want to say. I take a deep breath and try to explain the idea as much as I can, until I realize that by doing so, I did say exactly what I had been thinking.

I know now that I need to allow myself time to do this thinking-around process, because, while much easier, it takes a lot of time. It gets better results only if I am willing to fully put the time and effort required into it. This can also be interpreted as a general rule--I need to give each task I do, no matter what it is, the effort it requires and spend as much time as it needs, not try to crunch everything in to the last minute. Over the course of the semester, I’ve realized that procrastinating until the last moment does nothing useful for me. Slowly but surely, I have started to work on things as early as they call for so that I can be sure that I am producing the best thing I can.