Krisa Mie

这是我第一篇中文post，想表达一点我与新技术的看法。

我一直挺拧巴的。我获得第一部手机的时候已经是初三了，父母也是处于实用的角度（因为有一次上课外班和父母走差了联系不上）给了我一部功能非常简单的非智能机。那时候看到朋友们有各种功能和造型的手机还是非常羡慕的。后来妈妈的同事送给我一部iTouch，我基本上是当MP3用的。这也让我在音乐播放器和社交功能上，总是想把后来的智能手机拆分开来用。对于我来说，音乐播放器是专业的，有可玩性的，可以用来玩不同的耳机，比较不同的听觉效果。手机是交流用的，没有什么艺术性的享受，但也不妨碍我和好朋友通宵发短信，同时会为这种上瘾但没有创造性价值的行为感到羞愧。

再后来有了智能机，有了各种中文英文的社交软件，我花在手机上的时间越来越多，早期还有父母老师在边上教育，不要把自己沉沦在社交媒体的碎片化信息里，但后来这样的声音越来越弱，可能因为他们也沉沦进去了吧。我还记得我刚开始刷朋友圈，微博，刷ins的时候，都会惊讶于怎么会一次刷那么长时间，但后来会觉得主页刷新得不够快。到现在用小红书，刷新一下就是完全不同的内容，但同时我还是觉得学不到什么，更不用说抖音，我到现在还是不敢下载。我也时常在做一些努力。我有kindle，用便携相机，有一个依然可以插普通耳机线的音乐播放器，大大小小的手账本，水彩盒子，一堆东西满满当当每天背在包里，我会去使用它们，当我专注用他们的时候，我非常享受并且觉得这样做事情是更有意义的，但我依然还是会自然地溜回手机去刷没有营养的大片大片的信息碎片。

与之相关又不相关的，是人工智能AI的兴起对我生活的影响。更多来说，是工作上的。我的教授反对AI，尤其在教学上，学生滥用AI让她很头疼。学校里一般的教学规则syllabus也会禁止使用AI，但这种纸面或者口头的禁止只能说有掩耳盗铃之嫌，除了有学生非常坚定地反对ai（一般也是更独立的学生），几乎没有办法防止学生使用或查处ai（除非学生非常滥用露了马脚）。作为一个科研者和非英语母语的人，ai确实能为我提供一些便利，但同时，要在合理使用和过分使用间划清一条线，会是很难得，更不用提学生。最近学校提供了一个数据安全的ai使用软件，我觉得还是挺不错的，虽然还没用过，现实中既然无法断绝，就应该更好地引导人们学会如何更好地利用这个工具，而不是说得很可怕，但是学生也不知道怎样好地利用。 课程里，与其谈之色变讳莫如深，不如把ai使用作为一种能力纳入学习内容中，给学生提供一个好的使用蓝图。当然，对于教师来说，到底什么样是个好的蓝图，也会是一场浩大的讨论。

I don’t know why I started this gain.

Now I am sitting next to a window of Gilbert building, from where I can see the Stanford campus and the Memorial Church, making any efforts to delay my progress writing the proposal of my postdoc project. After 8 year from the last post, I am kind of living my dream as a postdoc at my dream lab study my dream project: ant collective behavior. I wonder during the time I was writing my previous post, if I had figured out this could be the topic I really want to study.

I miss the time when I was at UIUC as an undergrad, a bit struggling to explore the new environment but full of hope and excitement exploring my new life. I would say now I am still full of hope, but something had changed. I don’t think it is a bad thing. I experienced a lot, understand this society better, more anger but also more connection. I found new friendships, my first love and my life partner, and I don’t want to talk about this part in this post.

I haven’t figured out what I want to write about since I am back, or when is the next post, or in English or 中文. We will see.

It is so sad to find out that this is the last class and I am so glad to meet you guys here! (And a little happy for no homework anymore~)

This class helped me a lot in my writing. In my second piece of blog, I mentioned that it was much more difficult to write in English than to write in Chinese for I need to translate my thought from Chinese into English. After so much practice in this semester, I fell easier with this process and learn a lot about how to express my ideas precisely and logically. Before that, I was not familiar with the structure of academic writing, and did not know how to write a good thesis statement. Thanks to this class, I got these skills including how to use our library database  to search for peer reviewed resources (after the librarian meeting) and how to cite my resources in APA style in my essay, which will be beneficial to my major courses. Next semester, one of required major course requires a lot of writing work and I will take several philosophy class, in which I also need to write papers in a critical and coherent way. Therefore, our ESL class is a good base for me to meet these classes.

My favorite part of the class is the class when we made up some dummy books, articles and websites to practice forming APA citations, which was funny and helped us gain the skill quickly. I also enjoyed the time when we communicated with our pals directly in class after we finished peer review activities, which helped us understand the meaning of our pals’ notes in their peer review documents. According to the communication, we could find out the different thought among us and realize what we were not clear enough when we wrote the drafts. However, I don’t like the sections of the peer review during class time because it is kind of wasting time and we still need to work on that after class. I hope there will be more participants in the class, which could make the class more interesting  and we can learn more from each other. Fortunately, the class with a small population helped us make friends with each other easily and I felt free to express myself in front of you guys (Yes, I am kind of shy actually).

All in all our class is so amazing and I hope to see you guys again on campus in the future!

In this section, we made outlines and did some basic research for our IRP papers. It was interesting for we needed to choose a topic for a long term research, and I decided my topic kind of easily because there are several controversial topics in biological conservation field with actions based on academic research, and they are fascinating for me. However, when I started to work on the topic, I found it was difficult to figure out the specific problems and look for a suitable organization to focus on. To make clear what is the real problem, I review the knowledge I learnt in my biology class and read the background information in several websites including Wikipedia, Britannica and some organizations’ webs. After the research, I realized that most people are not focusing on the issue of the invaded Asian carp in the lakes but the threat from the fish to the Great Lakes. Therefore, I twisted my topic to how to prevent the Great Lakes from the Asian carps’ invasion. For the organization, I struggled for a long time. At first, I chose the most authoritative organization which is a cooperation committee but its website is not in the form we want and all the actions are not introduced in detail on their web. I decided to give it up after discussed with Jin and chose one of its fellow who has a good website and provide two material based actions. After these research, I have got a big view of my paper which helped me to learn more about the topic and also guide me how to do a pre-research for a specific topic. Since the topic is related to my major and thanks for the pre-research we did during this section, I believe myself get a clear outline for the paper I will write and get more familiar to the topic.

First of all, thanks for everyone including Jin for having a wonderful time studying and discussing together in the first module. Hope we can continue this in the next module.

I really appreciate the improvement I achieved in my final draft. I did really bad in diagnostic test and I got a terrible score. Therefore, I pushed myself concentrating on the lessons which would be really helpful for my writing, and trying my best to complete each practice and assignment. I leant a lot this time. Comparing my final draft with my first draft, there are so many amazing differences between them. Firstly, the structures of the assays are different. In my first draft, I only have two body paragraphs but contains more than all three main points I made in the final drafts, so the logic of the first draft was kind of messy. I didn’t give much explanation for each point and did not link them, either. However, in the final draft, I revised the structure that I analyzed the logic of my assay and summarized them in to three independent main points. I also reread the reading to find out the supporting materials which were really useful and persuasive for my points. For the thesis statement, I did not know that a complete thesis statement should give not only topic and opinion but also all the main points. I only have a one-sentenced conclusion and an excusive introduction, which I improved a lot both in structure and logic after the lesson about these two parts. In general, my final draft is totally a different assay compare to the initial one. In addition, my hundreds of silly grammar mistakes in the initial assay also have been corrected in the final draft.

Since I am preparing the application for scholarship in my major these days, the lessons really helped me to write my personal statements. To begin with, I tried to figure out what the benefits the reward would bring to me and how many points I should mention in my statements. Then I tried to find out persuasive reasons and illustrations for each point and made my main paragraphs in a PIE structure. It is kind of different from what we write in class, but there are still some similar things and the knowledge from the class helps me to express my opinion structured and clearly.

My first memory of writing went back to the time when I started to learn Chinese characters in my primary school. Something special was that my father is some kind of writer. He wrote poems and told me writing was just a method of expressing myself, so I felt free with writing in Chinese even for the first time. At first I only wrote separate sentences or a brief paragraph to describe a figure, and I would be eager to write down all the things appeared in my mind, even sometimes I did not know how to write the right characters (I used alphabetic instead). I like writing in Chinese and developed the habit of keeping dairies.

However, writing in English is kind of different experience. Although I have learnt English since I was in kindergarten, I always have a process changing the message from Chinese to English in my mind when I do English writing, and considering about vocabularies and grammars bothers my expression a lot. I guess that is because I did not use English so much in China which is not my native language. Most situations for me to write in English are in exams, which are bored, to be honest. Therefore, writing in English is always linked to some dull experiences. I hope this can be changed. Last semester was my first semester studying in the US, and I struggled with writing in my major courses. In the biology class, we needed to write lab manuscripts and posters, which was a challenge for me. I would write the staffs early, bring them to my TA, and edit for several times. I can image what I wrote was still creepy in the final version, but my TA was so kind that she always gave me good grades (maybe she considered about my positive attitude). Luckily, I find out that writing in English becomes more interesting because it is useful now. When I writing manuscripts, English helps me to show my results of experiments and express my ideas on the topics. Now I am also thinking about keep a dairy in English, which may be helpful for my English writing.

Hi guys! I am Dajia (Krisa) Ye, a transfer student from Beijing, China. My major is Integrative Biology which is my favorite and I hope to become a scientist after graduation. Since academic writing is so important in biological researching field, I am looking forwards to my improvements brought from this course and making friends with you guys!

p.s. I like squirrels, Star Wars and Michael Jackson.