#firstblogpost – Page 2 – English 1102: Television and Feminism

Hello everyone! I’m Sierra Villarreal. I am currently majoring in Biomedical Engineering and hopefully graduating in 2022.

Even though I am an engineering major, English class has always been one of my favorite classes. English 1102 will be my first English class at GT, and I am super excited to see the analytical twists that it has to offer. A large part of most English classes are analyzing different mediums while in this class we focus more on the communication aspect. I see so many exciting applications for this because communication- whether it be written, oral, visual, electronic, or nonverbal- is an incredibly important skill for a successful life. I enjoy written and visual communication the best because those are the two mediums that I practice most frequently. I would love to improve on my nonverbal and oral skills because I believe that conversation is a lost art.

As far as television and feminism goes, I have a newfound appreciation for both. Television is one of the most influential aspects of society since TV shows have the ability to reach people in masses. I love binge watching a good series, but I love even more when a series defies my expectation or leaves me contemplating unanswered questions. My favorite thing to look for in a show is something confusing that will hopefully give me a new perspective or absolutely absurd satirical comedy.

For my TV show that I will be analyzing this semester, I chose Sense8. Sense8 is an American science fiction drama in which 8 people all over the world share a random connection. This connection is a strong emotional, sensual, and intellectual connection. I chose this show because it represents many different types of people all over the world and will hopefully provide me with some interesting perspectives. The show has also been recommended to me several times and now I have an excuse to watch it! Stay tooned to go on this journey with me:)

Philippe Lamarche in 341 Words

By Philippe Lamarche

Hi, and welcome to my first blog post. My name is Philippe Lamarche, and I’m a Quebec-born Biology major projected to graduate in 2022. This is my first experience in an English class at Georgia Tech, and there are a couple reasons as to why I’m looking forward to this course. English classes in the past have taught me important lessons that go far beyond the walls of the classroom, and I believe this will be no exception. They have greatly improved my quality of writing, given me valuable public speaking practice, and pushed me out of my comfort zone with multimedia projects. However, my development as a multimedia content creator is far from over, and my gut tells me that I will be getting plenty of opportunities to improve.

Additionally, this class will introduce me to a variety of television shows that will expand my understanding of the genre. I have never been an avid television viewer, so I feel that this is a media outlet that I can learn from. Clearly, people put lots of passion into television shows they produce, so it’s only natural that they would contain insightful themes or interesting comments on the state of society. I’ve picked the television series Jessica Jones in the hopes that it will contain just that. I’m choosing it based on positive reviews I’ve heard from my friends, as well as an interesting premise that I think will keep me captivated throughout all the episodes. It’s a show about a ex-superheroine with a dark past who becomes a private investigator in NYC dealing with people who have remarkable abilities, like herself. The protagonist is really interesting because she is both clearly flawed and clearly powerful, so seeing how she will handle her obstacles in the show should be very interesting. On top of that, she doesn’t seem like the generic strong female lead that we see in certain blockbusters like the Divergent trilogy.

Below is my Common First-Week Video, if you care to learn more about my expectations for this class.

This describes me (hope I English well)

By John Ryu

My name is John Ryu, and I am a second year Aerospace Engineering major. Hopefully, I will be graduating in the next 3 years. I’m also out-of-state so paying them tuition fees will be fun.

Image may contain: 3 people, meme and text

How I feel as a out-of-state student

This is my first English class I am taking at Tech (yes, I held off English for a whole year), and it’s already been a much better experience than previous English classes I have taken in High School. I especially like the electronic form of communication we are employing in this class. In previous English classes, every lesson would be another passage to read or another essay to write. This class seems to really focus on the electronic side of communication (probably because the topic covers Television/media).

In other realms of communication, I struggle most with written forms of communication. I always struggled with structuring my essays well. My ideas would often be everywhere on paper, and my essay as a whole would be incoherent with the main idea of the paper. Thus, I hope to improve on this matter through practices such as this blog post.

I am a huge TV fanatic. That’s why I don’t have a Netflix account, because I would probably spend 24 hours of my day watching shows if I did have one. Because of school, I forced myself to only watch 1 or 2 TV series at a time. At the moment, I am watching The Good Place season 2 and The Flash (once new season starts).

What I become if I get Netflix

The TV show I have decided to review is Jessica Jones, partly because I am a fan of Marvel movies. Also, I am reviewing this show because this character is one of Marvel’s darker characters, and I am curious how Marvel decided to develop this character. This series is about a woman named Jessica Jones who is a ex-superhero with super strength battling post-traumatic stress disorder. She opens her own detective agency that investigates individuals with special abilities.

Empowerment Through Blog Posts

By Emily Sheng

Hello, my name is Emily Sheng, and I’m from Lubbock, a Decently-Large City in the Middle of Nowhere, Texas. I’m a first-year majoring in Chemical Engineering (that might change) and I’m hoping to graduate by 2022. I’m a minority in many senses of the term, unafraid to speak my mind and passionate about combatting discrimination, so I’m incredibly excited for English 1102!

Just like many others, I’ve had a pretty average high school experience with English classes. I wanted to improve my writing and my attitude toward it, so I joined the IB program, which is notoriously a lot of writing. Through two years of constant research and essay-writing, I can confidently say that IB, although it didn’t give me many college credits, improved my writing and was worth it. As I am taking my first semester of English at Georgia Tech, I need to push myself out of the mindset that English is just about reading classic literature and writing 5-paragraph essays. In 1102, I will challenge myself to speak out in class without rehearsing what I’m going to say ten times in my head. I will also challenge myself to consider multiple perspectives, even perspectives that go against my values. Lastly, I will challenge myself to give English class my all, even though the visual and oral aspects of it will be challenging. Utilizing my strengths with electronic communication, I hope I can improve the forms of communication I find more difficult.

One of my main traits is analytical/introspective, so I constantly work on “knowing myself”. I know that once I start watching a show, I will ignore reality until I finish the show and everyone around me has forgotten who I am. So, I stay away from most TV shows and don’t have that much experience with them. However, this summer, I started watching The Handmaid’s Tale, a dark Hulu series based off Margaret Atwood’s novel. Set in a military-ruled US, fertile women are forced to bear children for their “Commanders” or face torture and death. The central themes about the lack of feminism and oppression seem to be perfect discussion points, but I wanted a platform and a reason to express my thoughts and opinions. The moment I read this course’s description, I thought of this show I started, but never finished. From the episodes I have seen, the show is not light-hearted and is difficult to watch at times but conveys an important message that I am excited to discover more of in the upcoming months.

One of the sayings I live by; also directly contrasts The Handmaid’s Tale’s idea of the future being run solely by men.

An individual’s English 1102 Introduction

By N

In Intro Post, Review Topic 1

Hello to all passersby, I’m Nelson Jiang. I’m currently a Material Science and Engineering major (subject to be changed with little notice), and I’m expected to be a 2022 Graduate (might be a bit of a stretch).

English 1102 is my first English class at GA Tech as I had taken the standard AP English (AP Lang & AP Lit) pathway in high school and was lucky enough to get the credit for English 1101. As I’ve struggled with languages in my early life, my relationship with English has not been good often being the class I struggle the most in. I enjoy and would like to improve my written and oral communication. However what I most struggle in would be nonverbal and visual communication, those are two communication skills that I still haven’t quite got the hang of yet. Interpretation of nonverbal and visual communication is a bit hard for me, and I’m often unable to understand the meaning that the author had intended. I really hope to get better with the entire spectrum of WOVEN communication.

As with the theme of the course, I haven’t watched television in perhaps four to five years and even then most of what I had watched were kiddie educational cartoons. I did really like Curious George and Martha Speaks as a kid. Most of my viewing screen time goes to YouTube. Most of what I know from television, I’ve picked up from conversations with my friends. As for feminism, I have a habit of wanting to stay in the middle as a moderate and avoid the two divisive sides of politics, so I don’t know much about feminism. Though I do hope to learn more about it, if possible in a nonpolitical sense. My experience with feminism is mostly limited to the Feminist Critique from AP Lit and learning about feminism in history classes.

I’ll be reviewing Fresh Off the Boat for my blog entries. The show is loosely based on Eddie Huang and his book Fresh Off the Boat. It’s about Chinese-Taiwanese family, from Chinatown in Washington,DC, that sets up a restaurant in Orlando, Florida with a dad that loves the American Dream, a mom that struggles to understand the culture, and kids that try to fit in. The family tries to fit into American cultural; whilst struggling to maintain a sense of their own Taiwanese culture. I choose this by looking through the entire list of recommended shows, looking through their synopsis, and watching the first 10 minutes of each show that interested me. I choose Fresh Off the Boat over the other shows on the list as I felt it was the first time I’ve seen a show try to connect with the upbringing of a first-generation Asian-American family. I connect with it as my sibling and me are first generation Asian-Americans with an immigrant family from China.

This was my parents at the end of each term during most of my school career.

A Brief Introduction to Caroline Turner

By Caroline Turner

In Intro Post, Review Topic 1

Hey! I’m Caroline. I’m a Global Economics and Modern Language major, planning *fingers crossed* to graduate in 2022.

This is me being totally stress free pre-college.

While I haven’t taken an English class at Tech, I took both AP Lit and AP Lang in high school which were both mainly composed of timed writings about weird poetry samples. These kinds of writings are not the most fun, but at this point, I think I can type up a relatively well crafted and grammatically correct essay. With all the practice I’ve had writing, from the alphabet in kindergarten to research papers in high school, I somehow still enjoy it. I’ve always wanted to write fiction, but my writing talent lies mainly in professional and scientific writing.

Verbal communication is pretty much the opposite of written, but I don’t have an issue with one on one oral communication. Verbal communication, however, also includes public speaking. Public speaking generally goes one way or another for me. I participated in research fairs in high school, and I did great with those. One the other hand, in class presentations are another beast. The most efficient way to become a better presenter is to give lots of presentations. I’m hoping (nervously hoping) that this English class pushes me out of my comfort zone and into being a more eloquent speaker.

In terms of the television half of our class’s theme, Television and Feminism, I don’t have much background with TV. I like watching HGTV just as much as the next person, and I do own every copy of Monk on DVD. However, I’ve always been more of a reader. I actually didn’t learn how to read even simple words until 2^ndgrade, but from then on, I have constantly been updating my personal library. I just prefer to imagine characters and settings in my head rather than having them presented to me.

This is my main reasoning as to why reading > television.

Since I don’t have much experience with TV shows, I asked my roommate which show was the best from the provided list, and she suggested Grey’s Anatomy. I’m trusting her judgement, and I’ll be watching Grey’s Anatomy this semester. From what I understand, it’s a medical drama about a female doctor and her colleagues within a hospital in Seattle. Obviously, I only know the basics, and I’m excited to jump into the show with no preapprehensions!

The First of Many

By Michael Zimmerman Lemus

Hello readers! My name is Michael Zimmerman Lemus, and I am an aerospace engineering major with an anticipated graduation in 2022.

In high school, I took a wide breadth of english classes. I took everything from traditional literature classes to Future World/Dystopian literature and creative writing classes. This has allowed me to learn a lot about myself as a writer and reader over the past few years. Thus, I’ve learned that I can do quite well when it comes to some aspects of communication, and not quite as well in others.

I’ve found that I’m quite comfortable when it comes to analytical writing (sadly, that doesn’t exactly mean I enjoy it…), public speaking, and visual/technological communication. However, when it comes to aspects of writing creatively, I tend to encounter some hurdles. I often have trouble getting myself out of the “analytical writing box” and into the “creative” one. Over the years, we’ve been so trained to analyze someone else’s writing that, when it comes to creating our own from scratch, I often run into trouble pushing myself to take a different perspective. Nevertheless, I hope that in ENGL 1102 this semester, I’ll be able to push myself to merge both analytical and creative writing to do assignments such as these upcoming blog post assignments, and I hope to push myself beyond my analytical limits.

I’ve definitely had my share of TV shows which I’ve binged and fallen in love with (Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, 3%, to name my favorites..), but I don’t consider myself a TV fanatic. If I get into a TV show I tend to find it difficult to put down, but I haven’t exactly had time to put myself in that position these last few years so it’s been hard for me to get to that point. I guess, in many cases, I’ve tried to avoid getting into that position out of my desire to focus on other things.

The TV show I have chosen to watch is called Westworld. The show is about a futuristic amusement park where high-paying guests go to indulge in their wildest fantasies without repercussions. I chose this show because I have always enjoyed futuristic literature and television, and I know HBO tends to produce high quality stuff. I’m excited to start!

(Here’s my senior picture which apparently doesn’t look like me..tough)

Adventures of a sOpHoMoRe bY cReDiTs

By Sanjot Singh

Hey guys! Its ya boi Sunny Singh, back at it again with another youtub- I mean blog post. I’m a Mechanical Engineer and I am expected to graduated in 2022 but we all know that’s probably not gonna happen.

This is actually my first English course here at Tech, but I am super grateful that I got such an interesting theme (television and feminism) instead of the history of snails or something. I did take AP English Language and English Literature in high school and those really helped me hone my oral communication skills through the various discussions throughout the years. I feel most adept at communicating verbally because it allows for actual conversations and allows both persons to express their first and most natural thoughts on a subject. However, the element that I struggle with most is written communication. I feel that my ideas get lost in my thoughts before I am able to get them down on paper. This results in my writing being all over the place and simply not flowing. And besides not flowing I feel like writing is also the form of communication that I am most afraid to initiate. I don’t know what it is exactly, but maybe the thought of actual words being written down with pen and paper makes the ideas seem so permanent. I think this psychs me out because I feel like it must be perfect and then I end up not writing anything. So, I definitely hope to work on improving that element of communication this semester but I also want to refine my non-verbal skills because I feel like they can be a major sign of respect or disrespect so it could never hurt to make them better, or well try to at least.

I was a very inconsistent TV fanatic in high school but I will say this last summer before college I did attempt to redeem myself. After dinner me and my brother would watch a few episodes of Gotham before going to bed and some nights those “few episodes” will turn into half a season and a bag of Takis mixed into a bowl of popcorn for the perfect spice-to-butter ratio. I prefer comedy and action TV shows but generally I will start a TV show, binge watch up to the latest season, forget about it, and then start over again with a new series.

I have chosen to review Fresh Off the Boat, which is basically about an immigrant kid trying to fit into American culture. I picked this show because I find the premise of the show to be extremely relatable and I think Randall Park is just hilarious. I’m excited to start watching and can’t wait to see what underlying messages the writers try to poke at through the comedy of the show!

How I feel about getting to watch another TV show for class

Woman Up! Intro to Me ENG 1102

By Hyunjin Kim