This assignment was special compared to the others, for the simple fact that I’d actually have to present it verbally in front of the rest of my class. Perhaps I had a bit of tunnel vision from the assignments beforehand focusing only on New York City, but I decided to write on the city yet again. This would be a decision that felt a bit out of place compared to the rest of my class, who chose to mostly focus on their own cultures and what made them stand out. Some even brought in articles of their culture to show to the class. Even in the face of that, I chose to just write about the neighborhoods I’d grown up in, and how they stood out compared to the others in the city. Specifically, I focused on how the two of them, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights (combined for the fact that they contained individual areas I’d frequented growing up), held the most diverse makeup of cultures out of any other set of neighborhoods in NYC, and how I thought it to be normal relative to the rest of the city. That is what I wound up putting into the draft, illustrating the different sects of people that you’d come across just strolling around either neighborhood with images to help visualize, as displayed in the PDF below.

At the end of the text is a peer review from one of my classmates, which did state some relatively minor pros but put one major con to the forefront; the lack of an actual meaning behind it all. Again came the issues with overtyping, but I was still a bit mixed on that one regarding the context of the text. I simply intended it to display that Elmhurst and Jackson Heights were packed to the brim with people from all walks of life, all looking to service and meet with one another in some way or another. That would be the reason for the intensive description of the different stores and people all about, to illustrate that point and to show just how close they were to one another in such a way that would not be common even in other parts of New York City. I did intend to still take my classmate’s concerns into mind and type up a second draft, but I never added anything onto it, and this draft became the penultimate form of the assignment for me. I presented this to my class with some rather stilted reception due to the still context-lacking nature of it, and thus I admit I am not proud of it. There will always be some kind of learning experience to take away from every assignment you create, and so it is still paramount to display this here as a means of not only showing my journey, but reminding myself of what to do in the future.