Season 1 : Week 1

Hi, all! As seen on my page, my name is Itzia. One year into the pandemic and I am tentatively an at-home college student. Ironically, I would much rather be home than in the dorms at UCI. There is just something about being home and having a flexible schedule that just sits completely well with me. Though I have been working and attending my online classes, this quarter appears to be more stressful than prior ones. I am not sure if it is me anxiously waiting for the next break, but it has been difficult adapting to online learning. Nonetheless, Why motto recently has been "I will thrive"! Ah, writing... my arch nemesis, if I do say so myself. My usual writing process is messy, no need to fib. I am a complete wreck in the beginning, but somehow I manage to construct well written excerpts. Reading and writing go hand in hand for me, I enjoy reading and my last writing class allowed for me to gain better insight on how to analyze and make connections with the text, but my writing can always use improvement and I am completely open to it! Some problem areas in my writing I cannot quite get rid of are organization and time management. I have not had the chance to do research before, but I am all for it, I am excited to start my researching journey in this course. In the articles presented to us this week, the topics I found most interest were how animals are capable of social lives and building friendships, as well as the spectrum of intelligence different species fall under. For starters, in the Article, "Friendships" it essentially tells readers how male dolphins are able to make lifelong friends and when that friend passes, the remaining male dolphin will appear to show sadness and seldom but after time heals and is able to continue its socialization. These dolphins demonstrate great competence of loyalty and social lives. I chose to focus in on that portion of the article because I am amazed at how sea mammals show great efforts of having emotions and social lives. In a moment of the article "Intelligence" I was deeply fond of the picture in which the authors placed species in different levels of intelligence. The graph like image ranked humans as most intelligent and bivalves as the least. All in-between were The great Apes and Cetaceans, Corvids, Social Carnivores and Herd animals. To me, this peace was most important due to the fact that in the human race we constantly undermine the intelligence of outside life, solely due to not having enough research or being poorly educated, animals have demonstrated countless times they are nearly as intelligent as humans.

This is me, freezing, yet peacefully posing on a bench in Big Bear!