Final Reading Evaluation

My hands down favorite reading we did this semester was by far, The Ramayana.  I'm not really sure what it was that made me like the story so much more than the Mahabharata but I just fell much more attached to that story for some reason.  I loved reading through the Ramayana and following the story line of a single hero with a solid supporting group rather than reading of five brothers that have a feud with their cousins.  I also really liked several of the free-choice stories that we read.  I particularly enjoyed reading the short Jataka tales.  It was a fun switch up to be able to read a bunch of short stories rather than reading one long story.  Overall, I feel that there was a very good balance between reading, writing, and feedback and I would not change this setup for next semester.  For the students who take this class next, I would just recommend keeping up with all of the assignments or even getting ahead when possible so that they don't miss an excessive amount of points.  Even with this however, it is still very doable to achieve the grade you want because of all the extra credit options made possible throughout the course of the semester.

Final Reflections

I really enjoyed the class this semester and I feel like I have learned a lot in this time.  Coming in to this class, I had no background knowledge whatsoever on Indian culture so reading these epics was a very interesting experience.  Overall, I am most proud of the amount of creative writing I was able to accomplish.  My entire writing experience before this class largely consisted of  technical reports heavily based on math and science, so this was a very different experience for me compared to what i am normally used to.  I will take the knowledge and creativity I have gained from this experience and try to apply it a little bit to my every day life, including my engineering coursework.  This type of class has opened up my eyes to the realization that there are very many different points of view for every type of problem and being able to get creative and see the problem from several different angles will greatly increase my chances of solving it.