My First Semester: Thoughts and Reflections from a First Year

To some sort of past and future version of me, I have a fear of being cheesy, of being cringey, I think most of us do. In fact, I think the use of the word cringey is cringey in and of itself. This semester, I took a class called Modern Essays with Visiting Professor Jaed Coffin and in the small cramped basement of PGill, he assigned my class an essay, in the style of writers like George Orwell and Joan Didion we answered the question of “Why I Write.” Now, this was hard, I have a lot of reasons to write, a lot of people do. But the prompt included another part, most beautifully and affectionately named “eat the roadkill.” To explain: if you’re going to write about roadkill, you should probably eat the roadkill. If you’re going to do something, understand something, you have to fully do that something. So I bought a journal, opened it, signed the date––9/20/2026––and ate my roadkill. I don’t like writing about myself.

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