Reflective Essay: My Experience At The University

I was the only sixteen-year-old in my first university classroom. It was one of those defining moments where I was painfully aware of how different I was from the people around me. I had not yet graduated from high school, and yet there I sat in a class on personal and social adjustment, feeling an odd combination of excitement and anxiety. I distinctly recall my heart pounding and my irrational fear that, at any moment, someone would inform me that I did not belong there. I was considered an oddity at my high school as the only student in the history of the school to attend secondary and postsecondary institutions simultaneously as a fulltime student. I was reminded of the fact not through vast support from my school's faculty, but through blatant vocal discouragement.

In an environment where a large majority of residents live below the poverty level, it must have seemed strange that I would attend university early instead of applying for employment. The initial hardships of my first year in college did anything but deter me from wanting to study anthropology. Indeed, the adversity I experienced only succeeded in intensifying it. My high school classes were rather cold and clinical in their teachings, maintaining a firm adherence to stating and memorizing facts with little or no attempt to have

I decided to focus on American narration, specifically concentrating on expressions of masculinity in men's magazines. It discussed dialogue in magazines as well as in teen male group settings, focusing on the conceptualization and presentation of gender in both circumstances. My overarching approach examined how masculine identity in the media has evolved over the last century. I further presented how manly behavior was glamorized in the text from three contemporary men's magazines, and juxtaposed it with an ethnographic work about how young men communicate and assert their gender