Self Evaluation of my Academic Year

It’s not the right time to evaluate my academic year, because classes aren’t over yet,  there’re lot of tests to take, papers to do and investigations to finish. But if I had to evaluate the whole academic year and my development on it, I think I must incorporate some crucial aspects. In the next lines I’ll talk about the subjects I had, the good and the bad ones, the distractions and obstacles I had to face and how I performed at the end, obviously, considering  the marks I have already and the projection of how I’m going to finish the academic year, at the final-final day of classes. 

The worst subjects I had were Statistics II and Quantitative Methods, contradictorily, I really like these themes, but teachers were very bad: they were boring, bitter persons and they didn’t explain very well. The subjects that didn’t make any difference where Social Psychology, Sociological Theory II and Epistemology, I didn’t like them very much and my marks in those subjects are quiet acceptable.  Economy I and II where two subjects very similar, because II it’s a strict continuation of I. Both were very difficult, but interesting, and luckily, in the first term, I had regular marks. I need one more mark in the second term, but I’m doing good.

And in the good subjects, I think first of all is Social Theory I. In this subject I learnt a lot! The teacher was very structured, clear and nice, and the themes were very interesting and important to my career –what can be more important than the classical authors?-. In second place, Social History of Chile. The better thing of this subject is the Teacher. Gabriel Salazar is an eminency in social history, and having him as a teacher it’s a whole experience. And in third place, Statistics III. I’m having this subject nowadays and I only have one mark. It’s a very difficult subject, but it’s very helpful to the future and I find it very interesting as well. It’s one of the most difficult subjects of the whole career, in the first test, I had a red mark, as most of my classmates. We’re waiting for the next test to revert this situation, we can’t fail the subject!

I can't no-talk about English. Sincerely, I took this class as an obligation. I thought that my English level was good enough to survive, so I didn’t think it was necessary improving it. But if someday I want to study in another country, I’ll have to have a decent level of English and the legitimate permission to do it from the University, with these courses and the obligatory tests. But in the last time I realized that this it’s really a necessary step to do that. School doesn’t give all the tools we need. And how can I miss the opportunity to say that the classes weren’t boring as I thought, the teacher is very nice, funny and energetic. 

This year I’ve had a lot of distractions, but one is more significant. Love have consumed an important part of my time, so I don’t do very much besides studies and my relationship. Sometimes this situation made me lose time for studying or working with my classmates, but sometimes it’s very helpful too, my boyfriend graduates from Sociology a little time ago, so he have helped me to understand contents of some subjects and he have helped me with summaries, when I couldn’t read all the texts I had to read. So, at the end, I think in spite of this distraction and the hard subjects, I’ve done very well, my marks are very acceptable and I can say I learnt a lot this year. I think I’m prepared for the next level, for sure.

Challenges in my discipline

Sociology is currently facing lots of challenges and situations to improve, related to areas like technology, social matters and education. Some of them are getting ideas and attempts to solve them.

In technology, the challenges are related to methodology instruments. Sociologists in general have several instruments to produce and process information, and they're very sofisticated and developed, but only who has the money to afford them can access to manipulate them. Sociologists who has no budget or sociology students like us must resign and use old technologies, with less options to work with, slower and more deficiente progrmas, like old versions of SPSS. The specific problem in our faculty about this specific program is that there are only a few licences to use it, and the courses are generally more numerous than licences that are available. The only solution is to invest in this and pay for more licences. Or use pirate versions, but I thinkthis option is impossible.

In social area, I think is important to be considered the social origin of the students and the schools they come from. In the first years of the career, the differences are important and remarkable. The grades in general (althought, like everithing, there are exceptions) are higher for people who went to private and high society schools. It´s funny to see the differences between knowledges and even in the quantity of books they have read. The challenge could be, in this case, to nivelate the students in the first years. Obviously, this proposal is presented only in the actual educational system`s scenario. If the structural problems of education area solved, this subject would be not a challenge anymore.

In the education area, there are several challenges, most of them are being tackled nowadays, with the carrer profile discusions, the MECESUP program, and the different comissions of students, that are working to propose new teachers and subjects, changes of old teachers and subjects and, the most important, to establish a new carrer profile by general consent. Also, is very important to stimulate and promote the interdiscinplinary team work with the other career in the faculty.