I chose to include my Meditation on Place essay in my portfolio because I saw myself truly improve from the first draft to my final essay. I worked especially hard on this essay by attending office hours with specific questions to receive guidance on what to do next. I felt as if I was doing the assignment all wrong, but I was able to include all three parts of analysis efficiently while being explicit about all the feelings the stairs evoked for me personally. This final draft is an entirely new paper that strings along the idea of community more clearly.

I found it important to include this because these thoughts go through most people's minds in this particular experience. When writing this paper about creating a place out of the stairs, it was easy to talk to other people about their experience on this widely public location. Once we all realized that we do the same thing, it was easy to talk about it. Including it in the essay made it more relatable and would help readers be more receptive of the authentic social interactions that take place on the never-ending stairs.

This major change follows along the string of including more personal anecdotes to make my writing more clear. This provides a contrast to my introduction that focuses on the feeling of being just another person. I am able to explicitly talk about the stimulus of home for me. My response of wanting that to happen here at Boston College is backed up with my experience with my family. This personal reference helps me explain the importance of recognizing people around campus and having meaningful interactions with others.

Drawing on my past two major changes, I was able to incorporate the same thinking into this. In my experience so far at Boston College, I had noticed that there was a sense of community in the upper classmen that doesn’t exist in freshmen class yet. At first, I struggled with how to explain how I knew. I thought it was just enough to say that I realized there was some sense of community, but it wasn’t. I included this anecdote of my club meeting in which the upperclassmen leaders instructed all of us freshmen to be more attentive of who is walking around us. This anecdote/experience helps me connect the topic I am writing about to something more meaningful to me personally. This explicitly explains the sense of community in the upperclassmen I couldn’t explain before.

Something I really had to work on was elaborating on a statement. I, as the writer, think it is explicit enough, but it really isn’t to the reader. I had found it hard to elaborate more on my initial response to a stimulus, but I understood the need to think more intensely about what exactly my response was. Part of this included realizing what my response can mean, which meant using examples of what I was trying to say. Here, I made the revision of adding in what that “similar experience” is for all Boston College students.

I decided to get rid of my general introduction that just elaborated on the numerous ways people would utilize the stairs. Instead of using many different prospects for what people are doing and what they might be feeling, I focused on myself. As I said in my writer’s statement, I learned the importance of using personal anecdotes to write more clearly. To introduce the feeling of being an unknown person in a huge sea, I was able to articulate my experience with feeling like one in a million where no one could identify me even if they tried. By using a personal experience of walking to class on the first day of classes, I can clearly explain this idea.

When thinking about the impact this place has had on me, I realized my experience was shaped by the people that made the store an actual place for me. I have this memory of a customer that was so loyal to our store that he came every day around the same time in the morning for his usual cup of coffee. My mom treated him like a friend instead of a customer, and it is clear that it resonated with him in this interaction with me. I believe this anecdote brings out the genuine connection I had with that Shell gas station.

In my original draft, I said I tried to help my parents work in any way possible without any explanation of what that actually entailed. I added how I tried to help out (certain ways) to make the narrative more personal and specific.

I worked more on this particular essay because I was interested in seeing where I would end up. I picked the starting point of the Shell gas station from the first paper and let myself freewrite. That is when I realized what I wanted the main takeaway of this one-pager to be: how the store has impacted me, specifically through the interactions with customers. At such a young age, I was observant, but it was not until reflecting on that experience that I was able to pinpoint why and how my time there has shaped my childhood.

This piece was originally a one-page response paper to Dorothy Allison’s essay, “Place.” In that response paper I mentioned my “secret place:” the Shell gas station my parents used to own. While I did talk about some aspects of the place that had shaped my childhood experience, I had felt that I could say a lot more about it. I wanted to use the skills I believed I really had excelled in (for my Meditation on Place essay) to create a shorter piece focusing on only one main aspect of the store that has shaped my experience. I was excited to write this piece mostly because I never actually share anything about it. I enjoyed being able to dive back into the past to bring out some vivid memories I wouldn’t have traded for anything else.