An evaluation of my academic year

To begin, I think that maybe I’m not in the best moment to do an evaluation of my academic year; this is because at the moment I’m really stressed up. I have so many things to do for college and I really have to do a huge effort to do all my duties, and doing them well. But I will try to think about my “performance” during this term and I’ll try to identify good points and bad points of it. I think that the seconds terms of the years always seem to past faster than first term, we have had a lot of seminaries, celebrations (like September, 18th) and conferences, so the academic work has been concentrated in a few weeks. (And that’s not too good!)

Well, I think that first I will talk about the good points:

Probably one of the things that I really appreciate is that I have learned since the beginning of this term to work with other people. Almost every subject that I took this semester ask us to work in groups, so besides I have known my classmates better I could learn how to share duties and a lot of social skills.

Other thing that was good for me was that I took Introduction to Economy in other faculty (FEN), I believe that economy is so necessary for anthropology students and it’s very bad for us that the department took out the course of the career program. Finally I think that was very cool that I learned about so much different social theories, and for my development as anthropology, I think is very good.


About Bad Points…

One thing that was very bad for me was that I over-sold me in the way that I really took a lot of courses and at the final I finished really stress-up (as I’m today). I didn’t (and I don’t) have time for anything I was so tired that in every free moment the only thing that I wanted to do was sleep.

Also, I have to say that besides, as I said before, it was good for me as anthropology known different social theories, there were some classes like ethnology and etnohistory that was very boring for me.

For concluding I really have to say that in general was a very good academic year, besides bas point I could really realize that I like my career and probably in the future I will enjoy to work as a Social Scientist. Obviously like in everything I think that there are some aspects that the career and the university have to improve, but I believe that I as a student have to guide my career and that is my responsibility to work and to find the spaces to work in my areas of interest.

I hope my next year will be as interesting as this year or more!

anthropology, dear anthropology

Today I really don’t want to do my blog, but as you all know, we have to do it, so here I go...
Hmmm I really believe that anthropology as a discipline has maaaany challenges , but I think too that the degree covers many different areas, so summarize all of them is so difficult. So I will talk about the challenges of social anthropology.
I think that in technology social anthropology doesn’t have so many challenges (as physic anthropology that has so much to do in that area, especially here in Chile); maybe when the anthropologist has to analyze the results of surveys or making demographic sadistic would be useful more technology.
By other hand I think that social anthropology has so much to say about projects that include technology, is very important that social scientist asses the project and they cooperate in the environment impact and the social impact studies.
Maybe education is the area that more interests me, I think that we, as student, have to organize our self to improve our education, and be conscious about the problems of the public education in Chile. That’s the first step to help people to understand that education is a big issue in our society and is the found of the equality of opportunities.
As anthropologist I think we can help (as Tudela sais) in the construction of public policies that regulate the functioning of the education, especially the policies that regulate the access and the financing of the public establishments.
I think one important challenge is to socialize the discipline, many people don’t know the career and when you say that you study anthropology they ask you if you study bones or if you are like Indiana Jones. I believe that anthropology has many contributions to make, but if people doesn`t know the anthropology labor, is difficult that people value the discipline and our work.
This challenges has to be transversal to the three specialties, and the anthropologist has to fight for a place in social science and in the society, we should present projects that include people and other discipline, and show our concern about the critical issues and problems of our society.