Inevitable but helpful obstacles

As an international student in university, I face a lot of difficulties. I have to well-organized my time to face stressful daily schedule, I need to build up my self-discipline, and keep balance between my social life and study. Among these difficulties, literacy understanding is the greatest obstacles within the course of my study. In order to fulfill the general education requirement, I have to take specific classes related to critical thinking and literacy interpreting. However, for international students, whose first language is not English, analysing articles,especially passages and speeches in 19 centuries or earlier, is the most challenging task. Additionally, those articles tend to be voluminous,thus wearing down my pacient.

To cope with my difficulties, I force myself to practice-enrolling more writing class and reading more history materials. Essay required classes pushes my limits. For each essay assignment, I firstly read articles abstractly and try to understand writers’ basic argument. Then I detailedly read them sentence by setence. Through using multiple colored pens, I manage to analyse articles from different lights-etho, patho and logo. For checking my interpretation, I go to TA’s office hour and CLAS’ writing lab every week.

However, improving language is not something that individuals can achieve instantly. It requires time and consistency. From my perspective, this obstacle is inevitable but helpful for every international student. I believe that to cope with this difficulty, the only mean is to constantly practice.