Evaluations and Reflections

                As the year is beginning to come to a close, it’s time to reflect on the courses and professors of the semester. In class, we fill out professor evaluation forms to assess the success in the professor of many categories including enthusiasm for teaching, how they convey material, and how the course was run overall. I’m leaving out many things, of course. There are about twenty questions about the professor and then it goes on to ask what class you’re in, your major, things like that. On the back of the evaluation, you are given the opportunity to write briefly about the professor and the course. These evaluations are extremely helpful in ensuring that Clark University maintains a high standard for their professors. What I have found this semester and the one previous is that my professors are really great at what they do. They are all very knowledgeable on course material and make themselves available to any concerns or needs of students.

                Psychology has been extremely interesting this week in particular. We’ve been learning about developmental psychology. Today, we talked a bit about children’s attachment to their caregivers. (Caregivers is used because the person who cares most for a child may not necessarily be the parent of that child.) There are two kinds of attachment: secure and insecure. About 65% of children in the United States have secure attachment to their parents while the other approximate 35% have an insecure attachment. If a child has a secure attachment to their parents, it means that they will explore freely in the presence of their caregiver, be upset when that caregiver leaves, and greet them warmly once that caregiver has returned. Insecure attachments have many different categories which can range from children being extremely upset when their caregiver leaves to hardly noticing the separation. When that caregiver returns, reactions may vary from resistance to seeming to be oblivious to the presence of their caregiver. This may not be interesting to everyone, but I think it’s cool how psychologists can classify children’s behavior and even make predictions, based on this data, of how these kids will interact with their own children when they are parents.

                In economics, we’re continuing to discuss macroeconomics. Currently, we are discussing topics such as unemployment rates and today we briefly touched on what it means for a country to be “developed.” Of course, there are only a couple of weeks of the course dedicated to macroeconomics, so everything we’ve been learning is on an extremely general level. I like that, though, because it allows me to decide if I have interest in the material and if I would like to seek out more courses in the future so that I can learn in greater detail. What I am discovering is that I have a much keener interest in microeconomics than macroeconomics, but I will keep an open mind and possibly take more macroeconomics classes in the future.

                Well, this entry is already starting to get on the longer side, so I suppose now would be a good time to come up with a closing topic. This is one of my final entries as a first-year student at Clark. I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read my blog and learn a little bit more about what life is like at Clark University. I hope you have found my information and insight to be useful and please do not hesitate to send me a message through this blog if there’s anything additional you’d like to know about my experience which I have not covered in my entries.