Mayra S.

Jimenez Martinez

Ms. White

Ap Literature and Composition

19 November 2020

Portfolio Reflection

Throughout the past four years of high school, University High has had a tough time as a

whole. This school has given me the opportunity to be a successful person and has also taught

me that I need to work very hard in order to achieve everything that I intend too. I have learned

to develop the correct time management skills, learn about the many different cultures that this

school is surrounded with, developing my communication skills, and so many more things.

Although I may not put every single thing I have learned into use, time management for

example, I still feel like I have grown excessively since freshman year. Although UH has this

way of taking over your life sometimes, learning to manage that has been something I’ve gotten

okay at. I have structured my portfolio into this way to overall show my journey since freshman

year until now and how I have learned to apply everything to my daily life, that being at school

for work. Overall, acknowledging my weakness as well as my strengths is something that can be

seen in this portfolio.

The first section of my portfolio contains all of the poetry work that has been completed

throughout this last month. The second part of my portfolio would be my reflection as well as my

college essay. And lastly, my third section is an overview of some of the things that have been

completed from freshman to junior year. The poetry responses overall took quite a long time to

do just because of everyone one of them had so many different meanings and so many different

approaches to be taken. I feel like I could have spent more time on them just revising them and
making sure that they all made sense and were a bit longer, but like I said before time

management is something that still needs some refinement. For my college essay I decided to

write a bit of an autobiography and explain who my parents are and why I have come to the

place in which I reside to this day. Writing my college essay was something that took a little bit

more thought and narrowing down of things because of the many different ideas that could be

put into a singular topic. Even though it was a bit more about my parents than myself, I decided I

wanted to take this approach to show the hardships that they had gone through as children and

the ebay that they refined themselves to not be like their parents. I had started off with a whole

different approach with horses and why I found them so interesting, but I had sat down one day

and had nothing to do so I decided to write a bit and then it just turned into this story that I felt I

needed to share. Although I ended up taking a very different approach with the college essay I

feel as if it is way better than what i had initially written. As for the work that I decided to

include from the years I have grown up with University High, I decided to pick something that

made my flaws stand out as well as others that did not. I am in general not a good writer because

I tend to get in my head way too much and just overthink the whole thing which results in

failure, so what I’m trying to say is that most of the papers that presented in my portfolio are

mostly flaws and fails because of me getting into my head so much. EVen with that though I do

feel as if I have become a better writer with better ideas and viewpoints even though sometimes

they might not make sense to everyone. Aside from just papers I have also decided to include

presentations that were created throughout sophomore year. I had a lot of fun working with my

partners and they were just overall so helpful and understanding of everything.