Academic Profile of Soufian Carson
This essay is based on an interview with Soufian Carson about his academic identity. We make our discussion about our academic history, experience, and pathway through a combination of in-person and face time calls. We also used text messages for some questions we have. Soufian is 18 years old student who attends Georgia state university. He has been in Georgia all his life and also finished his K-12 in Georgia. He graduated high school in 2020. He is very young to attend college at this age and I asked why? He told me he was supposed to be in grade 12 but because of his dual enrollment in high school, he finished earlier. After he graduated from Highschool he directly went to Clarkston campus. He attended the Georgia state Clarkston campus specifically for the location (it is near to his house). Sofian was a very good student in high school with a GPA of 3.72. Soufian is a computer science major. I was excited when hearing that he has the same major as I have. He is obsessed with coding and programming. He also likes the fact that a Computer Science degree is promising in the future because nowadays everything is changing to Technology.
The 3 words that described Soufian academic self are procrastinator, work fast, and determined. Soufian is a procrastinator which he does all his assignments and schoolwork at the last minute. Even though he starts all his assignments late he is still determined. Once he makes a decision, he will stick with it and make the most out of his time. He was telling me how he did last semester’s English final paper. He said that his final paper was due the next day and start working on it. Imagine the paper was 14 pages long and got a 94 on the essay. You can tell how determined and fast he is. According to D.R chews video in order to retain information for long-term memory, we have to give time by repeating the concept, again and again, to be able to store the information for the long term. Even though he is very fast at completing things he has to start working earlier on concepts in order to retain the information for long-term memory. This technique may work on writing or other subject but if you want your studying to stay longer it is recommended to start earlier.
In the middle of our conversation, we were talking about the college experience That we wish we could change, and Soufian told me that he would have changed the number of classes that we are taking for our major courses instead of being two days and long he would rather do small class hours and do the class multiple times. It was interesting he got a good grade at such a young age in high school. But Soufian told me that his grade wasn’t good as he wanted in some specific courses. The reason behind this is that his motivation went down than it is used to be before. I was curious how his motivation was down and asked him why he replied that during the pandemic all his courses were online and were hard to follow up. They weren’t learning very much, and everything was hard to follow up. He specifically mentioned the math course. He really doesn’t learn some of the basics in high school which will result in difficulty for later courses in college.
In conclusion, I have learned a lot from Soufian during our interview. The biggest thing I have learned is students have different approaches to learning. Some people might prefer online classes, long hours, short hours, and some prefer face to face. But if they feel like they didn’t get any of the basics in their previous course before continuing the subject I would say to look over the courses back and do the work again.
Work cited
Dr Stephen Chew” Developing a mind set for successful Learning”, uploaded by samford University,16, Aug 2011,Developing a Mindset for Successful Learning – YouTube