I only started using the Writing Centre recently (now that I’m in my fourth year aah). I wish I’d used this resource earlier but I never thought I had the time for writing appointments. This year, especially now that everything's…
How I’m making a homework-filled reading week enjoyable
Happy reading week U of T! For my break, I’m staying in damp and chilly Toronto and trying desperately to catch up on homework. While at first I assumed this would cause a disappointing vacation, I’m managing to make it…
Library Hunt
Personally, midterm season has kind of just crept up on me. I know starting classes on a Thursday this semester definitely threw us all off track a little with the whole, “is it week 3? 4? 3-4?” Whether you’re the…
Figuring out what works best for me.
Hi, I’m Sydney. I’m this year's First-year Blogger, and my favourite movie is Good Will Hunting. I -like many others- am still deciding what I want to study. Mainly because I’m really passionate about one thing: people, but I have…
Musing About Reading Week
Reading Week has come and gone, and now we're back to classes. Sigh. Every year, I look forward to the much deserved break and yet again, I fail to realize how quickly a week can go by. I always start…
Being Part of the Academic Community: Critical Reading Seminar
The way I see it, university is mainly about two things: reading and writing. Obviously this is an oversimplified view of what it means to be a student at University of Toronto, but one can hardly deny that outside of lectures and tutorials, the majority of student life is spent with either your nose in a book, or your fingers frantically typing away at an essay. I acknowledge that for some programs, essay writing isn’t a big component, but if you replace essays with problem sets or lab reports, the amount of writing that needs to be done for those are probably at par with writing essays.
I mention this because last Friday, I attended a critical reading seminar at E.J. Pratt Library and so I thought, why not write about what I learned at the seminar. Earlier this year, I wrote a post about going to the Writing Plus workshop offered by the Writing Centre. I was surprised by what I took away from the workshop so I thought to myself, lets see what I can take away from a critical reading seminar. Much like the Writing Plus workshop, I really wasn’t expecting to walk away from the seminar with very much in the way of new insights, but unsurprisingly, there were significant nuggets of wisdom that I thankfully was able grasp!