For General Education Goal 3, I chose to take Monsters of World Literature. The name of the class alone was enough for me to know that this class was going to be great, and it did not disappoint. The class focused on monsters in literature, from Gilgamesh to Dracula, and how these monsters reflected the times and ideals of the authors. This class was difficult because the professor challenged us to look at these stories in a different way than originally assumed, like questioning if the monster in the story was truly a monster. This was also the class that has challenged me the most in my writing so far. The professor had high standards for grading papers, and though I was stressed trying to meet those standards I also worked harder on these papers than I did in some of my other classes. I feel like this class helped me grow as a writer through both working hard to meet the professor’s standards and taking my professor’s advice as I constantly revised my papers. Though this was my hardest class I took that whole semester, it will definitely be my most memorable of that semester and one of the most memorable of my time at Longwood.

The artifact I chose for this class is the biggest paper we had to write during the whole semester, which was a research paper based on any of the readings we had done during the class. I remember this paper being very difficult to write, but I put a lot of effort into finding sources that spoke directly to the topic I chose to write about. Perhaps the most difficult thing about this paper was trying to keep the topic narrow and small enough to fit the length requirement, because I felt that I could have written much more on the topic, which was unusual considering I did not expect myself to be so interested in the topic. This paper helped me learn how to chose proper sources and also gave me experience in choosing a topic for myself and not just following a prompt. Writing this paper helped me tremendously with HIST 250, which I took the semester after this, and I am very appreciative that I was able to gain experience with this paper.