Overall, this first year seminar was one of the best writing classes that I have ever taken. From the class discussions, to visiting the Orozco and Hovey murals, I truly enjoyed this class. As a writer, I thought I was able to work on certain aspects of my writing that were not so strong coming in. The writing assignments were extremely useful in honing the skills necessary for college writing and learning to articulate thoughts clearly. I’m definitely going to recommend this class to my team mates and any of the other income Freshman who are looking for a First Year Seminar class to take. Thanks to Professor Moody for a great Winter term and a fantastic FYS!

After having written the rough draft of my research essay, editing my ideas and refining my thought process would be the next step in developing my essay. Working in groups with other students who had similar topics as I was extremely help in gathering thoughts and ideas to help add on to what I had already written. As I presented my initial rough draft to my group, I was able to gain valuable feedback as to what they saw as strengths and weaknesses of my paper, thus far. Personally, getting an outside perspective allowed me to better understand how others were able to perceive my ideas versus how I perceived them.

In addition, as other students presented their papers, I was also able to give them feedback on their drafts. Just as they were able to help me, I was also able to give them some advice on what improvements they needed to make and what they were doing well. The exchange of ideas between students was very useful in generating more ideas as I moved forward with the essay.

When our class was given the task of deciding on our topics for our final research paper, I knew that I wanted to do my paper on Frida Kahlo and her life. After watching the movie Frida for class, I was interested in diving more into the life of Frida. Her extremely unconventional life story peaked my curiosity and made me to want to research deeper into her life. While deciding on who I was going to research was easy, figuring out what aspect of her life I wanted to focus on was not nearly as simple. For me, developing the thesis for which I would develop my paper around was the most difficult part of starting my paper. Even when I thought I had a solid thesis, I would end up changing it completely, starting from scratch and starting anew. It would be after numerous changes and corrections that I would finally settle on writing about Frida’s celebrity status and her impact on numerous social movements.

After gathering a sufficient amount of information using the sources I had found, I began to write my first draft of the research essay. This process began by first trying to figure out what my thesis statement would be as the basis to which I would develop my whole paper around. This was actually the hardest part of the writing process for me, because, at this point, I was still uncertain at to which aspect of Kahlo’s life I wanted to focus in on. Once I was able to write my thesis, developing the rest of the rough draft wasn’t as difficult. For the draft, I wasn’t as focused on the structure or the flow of the paper nearly as much as I was focused on getting my ideas down on paper. This would help make the writing process a bit easier as I would go back to later edit.

When I first began to look for sources, like most students, my first instinct was to do a generalized Google search of Frida Kahlo. After getting an idea of my research topic, I began looking for research journals as academic research papers on Kahlo, as well as her rise to becoming the face of numerous social movements. Using sites such as Google Scholar, JSTOR, and Ebsco Host, I was able to find a few sources to help me grasp a better understanding of my research topic. We were also required to include at least 1-2 print sources in addition to our web sources. The Dartmouth Library catalogue was a great way for me to help narrow down and find books about Frida. I was able to find three books:

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera by Isabel Alcántara and Sandra Egnolff

Devouring Frida by Margaret A. Lindauer

Frida by Frida- which is a collection of letters written by Frida Kahlo to various recipients

I was also able to use the site Borrow Direct in order to rent the autobiography Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera, which is the book that truly brought Frida’s life into the spotlight and help propel her into the cult-like figure that she is today.