Joseph Newman Blog

     My name is Joseph Newman. I’m a freshman and a chemistry major hoping to do a lot during my time at NCC. In addition to chemistry, I'm also a huge fan of computer science. In high school i learned basic Java and Python but more recently I've been working in Unity with C#. I'm currently working on a game about woodcutting but every time I patch a bug two more appear. In my free time, I mostly talk with my friends and play video games, like Celeste, Hollow Knight, & Hades. I'm not in any clubs at NCC yet but I've been looking to join a few, although I'm not sure which ones yet. I’ve also started doing origami, but I'm still just a novice. I’m excited for the classes I'm going to take, but this semester I mostly have classes I've already taken in high school but still need credit for. I’m not really as good at writing as much as I am at ranting, so my blog posts may be more of a laundry list of ideas that come into my head as I'm typing....

     The microtheme we’re writing in class will be the first time that I'm writing a microtheme. In school, I haven’t really written much, if anything, other than standard five paragraph essays and argumentative essays, so this is a completely new experience for me. I'm much more used to writing argumentative essays, so trying to stick to the criteria of a microtheme has been a challenge. it's much more difficult to leave all my points open ended and up for interpretation than declare a stance as fact. I often found that the sentence I was trying to write was either too stanced or couldn’t properly convey what I wanted to say. I also found myself frequently resorting to writing in questions, which can’t be included. Despite only being a single page long, it takes, or at least feels like it takes as much effort as if it were three pages. When writing drafts for the microtheme I was having a hard time focusing on one top and sometimes lost my thesis entirely. After a half h...

    When I write papers, I usually write the bulk of it at once. Most of the time I find myself starting with notes, and outline, and potential topics, and then going straight to an almost final draft. Because I normally work like this, it's much harder for me to work on something a little bit at a time, and peer review or work checkpoints become more of a hassle than helpful. I also tend to procrastinate a lot, so combining both these things leaves me writing most of my papers a few days before they are due. I still value and need someone else to look at my paper, but that usually involves me messaging my parents to edit it at 11pm the night before it's due. Even with this post, I’m writing it a few hours before midnight on Sunday because I couldn't convince myself to start it sooner. In addition to my questionable time management skills, I also like to wait until I have a clear idea in my head of the criteria for the assignment I'm doing. Over the course of the microt...