Introduction

The initial thought of attending college filled my mind with trepidation.  For the most part, I had worked relatively hard in high school in hopes of attending a suitable university.  By the time I was a senior who already had aspirations of becoming a Nittany Lion (I was accepted into Pennsylania State University by November of my senior year), two thoughts began to worry me: I hadn't enjoyed any of my classes throughout all of high school and had not applied myself at all during my final year before college.  The belief that if I did not enjoy any of my college courses, I wouldn't succeed at Penn State constantly gnawed at me, and I felt that my "senioritis" (the term for seniors who give up on school) would leave me wholly unprepared for the trials ahead of me.  I couldn't have been more wrong.  In my first year of college, not only have I worked harder than I ever did before, but I found all of my courses to be enthralling.  My thirst for knowledge had become as potent as it's ever been, like a young boy who obsesses over each and ever detail of his new video game.  As a testament to my new found joy of learning, I created this E-Portfolio, which displays my work from the years I spent (and will spend) in college.  Thus, the purpose of this portfolio is two fold: to pay homage to the new ideas and thoughts that I have learned while attending Penn State and to showcase the improvements that I have made in both my writing and rhetorical skills.  I hope that by presenting the essays, blogs, and speeches that I will have written throughout my time in college, my passion for learning, which was all but dead as a high school senior but has now been reborn thanks to Penn State, will become apparent to the reader.