Student Interview with Diana

March 2014 - Diana Ramirez

Diana Ramirez is a freshman here at CSUSM enrolled in Tyler Bellis’s GEW class this semester and she is also a First-Generation College student. Her family is very supportive and proud of her attending college. Although she applied to multiple colleges, she chose Cal State San Marcos because it is close to home. She is majoring in Nursing because she was inspired by the nurses she met while her own family members had to spend time in the hospital and she knew then that would be a career she would like to pursue.

Diana is enrolled full-time and takes her classes very seriously. She says the best part about GEW is how it has helped her to critically think through much of the reading from not only Professor Bellis’s class, but her other courses as well, especially her Political Science course. She said she has already begun to see a real difference in the way she is able to analyze the perspective of an author or a text and this has helped her in her writing. She appreciates the reading that Professor Bellis assigns because she says it is interesting, and she also likes that he pushes his students to think for themselves.

She mentioned several times that college is far different than high school, specifically in the ways that college instructors expect the students to come up with their own ideas and their own arguments, whereas in high school it is “fed” to the students. This makes the classes more challenging, but more interesting.

One secret to her success in her classes is that she takes notes on everything. This gives her the ability to go back and review anything from class and apply it to her assignments at home. She recommends this same tool to any student, as she said it is one of the most effective ways to help one learn.