Glae Paw was initially born in Thailand and was part of a refugee group before she came to the USA. She was born on July 2, 2006, and is 16 years old. Her parents are from a village on the border of Thailand. Glae moved to America in 2012, so she spent more time here than in her own country. From kindergarten to 2-grade, she went to Indian Creek Elementary. Later, she transferred to a charter school at International Community School during 3rd grade. From 3rd to 5th grade, soccer became one of her hobbies, and she enjoyed it more than school. Glae attended GSU as a dual enrollment student in her 11th-grade year in high school. Based on the definition of the academic self, Glae describes herself as creative, curious, and persevering.

Glae thinks of herself as creative because she feels that everyone has this trait as them like it’s self-built. Anyone can be creative in various circumstances, but she feels her originality is most evident in the classroom. When working on practical undertakings or writing fiction, Glae frequently exhibits greater creativity. Glae completed numerous tasks in her previous academic years, including crafts. In middle and high school, Glae would use boxes to create the water cycle or biomes, and she would use clay or styrofoam to make the cells and their parts. These initiatives, according to Glae, require inventiveness, which she demonstrated when dealing with it. Being given the task of writing a story was familiar to Glae after each grade. Yet, whenever Glae is given an assignment, she always thinks of something different, something beyond imagination or something within realism. Glae feels that her environment and surroundings influence her creativity.

Curiosity is another quality Glae identified with her academic persona. For Glae, there is a fresh experience at every grade. When Glae transitioned from elementary to middle school, she encountered new readings, math challenges, and writing assignments. Math problems that previously required adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing integers progress to equations and properties that are more complicated. Many constraints constrained the narrative writing that Glae used to do to particular types of writing, such as narrative poems or various forms of poetry in general. As Glae reads about new topics, she can also expand her expertise. These shifts increase her interest as she is exposed to unique learning circumstances. When Glae is in a new or different class, she gets curious about the various teachings, strategies, and modes of instruction. She also believes that curiosity is a quality that comes naturally to everyone. She felt foreign at that moment because of the various educational levels she had completed, which led her to imagine what it would be like in that situation. Glae has been exposed to a different learning environment even up to this point, which causes me to wonder and reflect.

These traits are how Glae would evaluate her academic self to be. Glae explores her surroundings with wonder as she navigates the ever-changing educational environment. This sparks her thoughts and questions regarding the future’s prospects and expectations. She is also prompted to wonder and ponder, which helps her acquire knowledge and experience that she could use later. Additionally, Glae is developing her perseverance abilities due to the ongoing changes. Glae must be able to grasp the earlier lessons and make an effort to comprehend the classes she is currently taking because each subject’s information builds on what she has already learned. There may be changes in new teaching material, but she feels like it shouldn’t stop or discourage her from progressing. The school has also allowed her to show creativity through arts, construction, and questioning within the different levels of its adjustments.

During the DelbancoCollege reading, the sentences that stood out to her were during the Introduction (pg.2, paragraph 2) “the criteria we use to assess the quality of college- number of publication by its faculty, size of the endowment, selectivity in admission, rule of alumni giving, even graduation rates- tell very little about what it does for its students.” It stood out to her because she felt like those characteristics had always been what she centered and surrounded herself during school environment, and then suddenly reading about how it “tells little about what it does” seemed surprising. Another sentence that stood out to her was (pg 3, paragraph 2) “A college should be a place where young people find themselves navigating the territory between adolescence and adulthood. It should provide guidance, not coercion, as students find their way to self-knowledge.” This sentence stood out to Glae because she agreed with the statement. Glae felt that college should be where she could explore her interests.

Citation

Delbanco, Andrew. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2014.