Final Reflection.

My topic hasn’t really changed much over the course of this class. I have always really focused on the importance of good influences on students in school. However, I did change my final paper to focus just on good influences and other factors that affect incoming college students. My claim didn’t really change after the exploratory essay I just went more in detail with it. It is very important for students to have motivation, positive influences, and more information on how college will be. I saw my claim really coming together right before the exploratory essay, that’s when I decided to focus on older students. The process of research really helped me shape my ideas, just because there were a lot of articles on the importance of college and how the dropout rates were rising because of students being under prepared. My final project will focus on incoming college students instead on students of all ages or just younger students. I felt the need to narrow down my topic that way there wasn’t too much confusion on which grades specifically I was focusing on. Now I only focus on high school level students, mostly grades 11 and 12. However, my topic hasn’t greatly differed from my exploratory essay at all. I enjoyed doing the research for this project just because it gave me insight on why college students have such a rough freshman year while transitioning. It has everything to do with the preparation that these students have before entering a 4 year university. At first I thought that it was just the students learning abilities and the social life aspect. After I researched further I found that most students don’t do well because they don’t know what to expect in college. They think it will be like high school and they are sadly mistaken.