Part 1:

Dear Future students,

I hope you are doing well in your university years. I really want to share my experience in this course, which somehow shaped who I am right now. I see this course as one of the courses that gives you life experience without getting it personally from the day to day interaction. This course consists of sharing experiences, thoughts and skills which differ from one person to another. At the beginning of this course it was hard to start talking about relevant things that happened in my life because I didn’t know my colleagues well. I always had this thought that I shouldn’t share this, it’s not that relevant and it won’t really contribute to the conversation. One day I started talking and from then I contributed with my best during the in class conversations as I learned that when I talk someone else is listening and learning from my experience in something and reflecting it on his life experience. This changed my attitude as I started to learn more and more about how it affects me. I started thinking that if someone shares with me one of his life experiences and I face something similar, I will have some background knowledge about this situation. This will give me a constant advantage in my life. This is something that affects me socially as I start to hear more about everything anybody says. Interacting with classmates and joining group discussions is something that can boost your confidence and this helps you in all aspects like socially, academically and even in your career. This course taught me how important it is to analyze situations, listen to others, and approach decisions with a thoughtful mindset. These skills will stay with me wherever I go.  Also during class time and assignment we get to watch a lot of videos that affect the way we think, that basically share different experiences and topics. We also played games about relevant topics to us as students that I would recommend to anyone who is trying to develop themselves. One of the games I played was about judging. It assessed my reactions to certain situations and it gave me options. This game showed how much I follow my judgment in every situation. This is something that made me learn not to judge in a bad way, but it teached me the importance of analyzing every situation in a better way. This game is called Know Yourself. Also, I started to feel empathy in certain situations in the game BBC Syrian Refugees where I played the role of a Syrian refugee trying to flee war in my home country. This made me change the way I think. I started putting myself in the position of any person I am interacting with which helped me socially.It taught me to approach people’s story with more understanding. Another assignment was for Lina Mouzer https://via.hypothes.is/https://lithub.com/war-in-translation-giving-voice-to-the-women-of-syria/ Links to an external site., that also taught me to visualize situations on refugees and see different perspectives to this case. I actually do not want to change anything about this course, but if I have to I would say that there were too many assignments conflicting with other subjects that I could not handle sometimes which made me feel overwhelmed sometimes trying to manage all courses together. I feel that if we had less assignments that would allow us to focus on them more. Also, sometimes that deadlines were too harsh, as we had to submit our work 8:00 am, I think it would be better if we had the rest of the day  .Anyone who wants to learn about themselves and the people around them, this course helps you grow as a person, not just as a student.