blog post #1

My name is Francesca Tabana, but I'm often referred to by my nickname Frankie. I'm a 21-year-old senior undergraduate student here at Florida State, and I'm majoring in Psychology and Economics with minors in Sociology and Education. Some of my hobbies include music (I am a member of the FSU Campus Band and am currently learning my 5th instrument), playing and collecting vintage (and new!) Nintendo video games, and cooking/baking yummy dishes. I am the middle child of 5 girls from my parents, although I do have four older half-siblings (two brothers and two sisters) on my father's side, along with 8 aunts and uncles so I come from a rather large family. My parents and older siblings are all originally from Jamaica, but my mother immigrated to the United States a few months before I was conceived and so I was born in a small yet vibrant neighborhood in Queens named (ironically enough) Jamaica. After about 5 years, however, my mother began to long for the tropical climate in which she had lived her whole life, so she decided to move us exactly 24 hours south to a small city in southern Florida known as Port Saint Lucie. This is where I spent my formative years and met my four best friends (to this day!) and until my recent relocation to West Palm Beach is where I've called home for the past 15+ years.

Being that I'm currently in my last semester with two majors and minors, it probably goes without saying that I've had to take a lot of classes in my undergraduate career. As a result (and also in part due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic), a good portion of those classes has been offered outside of the traditional in-person setting. In fact, in my very first semester as a freshman, I enrolled for a fully online course (CHM1020C) in which we learned the course material through a murder mystery simulation through the online program Second Life. This was my first 100% fully online course at FSU, and I absolutely loved the experience. It was a very different approach to the traditional way of classroom learning but I found that it engaged me more, and having the ability to complete the lessons whenever I chose was a major plus for me as well. Since then, I have aimed to take at least one of my courses online per semester if possible, just to give myself a bit of freedom when it comes to reserving time to sit down and focus solely on my schoolwork. I also have had to take multiple online courses as general education requirements (specifically to demonstrate computer competency) as well as for my math-based courses, such as Analysis of Economic Data, Applied Statistics, Introduction to Econometrics, etc. As a result, I have an extensive amount of experience with online courses as well as with basic computer programs such as Microsft Suite. 

I personally am a very self-motivated student; I love to learn (especially about things that interest me) and I love to have that love of learning reflected in my performance. Even still, there are times when I need to rely on others to provide supplemental information for clarification, or even just to help make completing my work a bit easier. I'm always utilizing online academic sources like the FSU Libraries database and MyBib to help me find and organize academic journals/sources and citations for my papers and class assignments. I also am quite a savvy social media user; I use Twitter topics to curate my feed to show me trending posts from fellow students regarding graduate school (one of my future career goals) and also have joined multiple Reddit forums regarding some of my specific subject areas to help others and also to have a support group when I may need a little extra encouragement to keep pushing through. I also think that it's very important to keep up to speed on major findings and publications within your specific area of interest, so I've also joined academic organizations such as the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in order to keep myself abreast of any new information on the latest trends from across psychology subject areas. My involvement with student organizations on campus has also provided me with resources that I use to further my personal connections with others in my field, examples being my membership with FSU's Psi Chi International Honor Society for Psychology and the FSU Economics Club. I think that a nice balance of both online and offline resources can complement and enrich the learning experience greatly, as long as the student is utilizing the right resources for them!