My name is Chowdhury Sarwar and I am a freshman at City College of New York. First semester of college is almost near it’s end and I have learned a lot over the period of these three months. It was pretty difficult transitioning from high school to college but I got a general idea of the expectation in college compared to that of high school. It was very different, high school writing could be more general as college level writing requires more analysis and in depth information as much as possible. Mr. Druffel has helped me figure this out throughout his course.  My classes this semester were pretty writing intensive. They included USSO and two FIQWS classes about Iranian gender and politics. The writings in my FIQWS classes especially this one were more academic level where as the USSO papers were more of a essay for the professor regarding the topic. We learned how to write various types of paper. Discovering that there were other formats of papers with different concepts was really interesting. Till now different types of essays was all I thought writing consisted of. But, Mr. Druffel consistently focused on introducing us to these real life papers that might be important to us later in life when pursuing our careers.

Apart from all that Mr. Druffel also helped me write better papers. I was struggling with getting more words on the paper. Reaching the word limit was always a difficulty for me. He explained how adding on to ideas and evidence consistently throughout the paper would help overcome this difficulty. Before I used to just state evidence and write a few of the authors interpretation without adding my own thought but after talking to Mr. Druffel, I understood that even more could be done. Reading was also one of my weak points. But due to a few of his tips and tricks I can find out what a source is about and if it is valid for my paper, in the matter of minutes where as before I had to take a whole hour to read through the whole source. Searching for crucial words like ‘however’ and reading the conclusion are important. I’d recommend other current freshman attending college for the first time to apply this technique. This saved a lot of time for me and enabled me to finish all my papers in time. There is a lot of papers in college that need to be done and this was a game changer for me. Along with this formatting my paper was also another issue that I think many others struggle with too. Mr. Druffel talked to me individually to explain how it works. There is a general format that fits most papers however some do require a little key changes. He explained that introducing the topic and the stance along with some explanation and then ending with a strong conclusion would fit most paper needs but making sure to stick to the topic is really important. Over the period of the course I’ve improved a lot in writing papers, my confidence and quality of paper have improved significantly as well. I’d recommend other students to follow these tips from Mr. Druffel and try to apply them on further papers.