Kaitlyn

I grew up forcing my brother to watch princess movie after princess movie. I was enthralled by the feeling of happiness that always seemed to gush from the characters – most importantly, their looks of euphoria as they rode off into the sunset together, engulfed in their love for one another and nothing else. From a young age, this dogma was shoved deep into my mind: a story can’t have a good ending unless the two love interests live happily ever after. I couldn’t imagine a story any different. This traditional narrative plot is a universal one that has been so deeply engrained in so many of us. Yet, when we look at Exit West, Mosin Hamid does not uphold our romantic expectations for this book. Our protagonists, Nadia and Saeed do not get married and run off into the sunset together. They break up. Hamid breaks our expectations. Hamid also challenges our other conventional narratives including our expectation that the protagonists will be the central  story, or, on a more global scale, how we expect migration to be world-ending.

But, Hamid fails to uphold this central theme to the end of the book. He presents a final scene where Nadia and Saeed meet again years later, and their interaction provokes feelings of longing and ‘what ifs’ in our mind about what their relationship might have been. Hamid is fulfilling, at the very least, our desire for closure and a final reunion. If Hamid is finally upholding our want for a romantic ending, why does it leave me so grossly unsatisfied? By satisfying our narrative expectations about the traditional romance story at the end of his novel, Hamid undermines his efforts to rewrite conventional plots and place protagonists and migration in a new light. And the crazy thing is, Hamid comes agonizingly close to avoiding this mistake.

One of the most traditional narrative patterns is a constant emphasis on the protagonist(s). After all, the author wants to make you fall in love with these characters that they have crafted and carved through their fingertips, like no other story could compare.  However, Hamid strikes his own path. When I first started reading Exit West, I was confused by the seemingly random interludes to other stories that felt like they don’t belong. Hamid gives us vivid descriptions of new locations and characters, inviting us to enter into a new storyline, and then completely drops them. We never return to one of these plots again.  I think Hamid intentionally includes these side plots to emphasize to us that, although a book might only tell one story, there are a plethora of other stories that are worth telling.

Any one of the vignettes might have been even more enthralling or compelling than our story that focused on Nadia and Saeed. My favorite vignette finds a powerfully-built main having a smoke outside a bar. Although the scene starts out calm, it begins to heighten when two teenage Filipino girls step out of what we later discover to be a magical door. Instantly, Hamid’s powerful prose makes it evident that these girls are in danger. Hamid describes the girls through the lens of this possibly dangerous man, by saying, “They seemed emotional: perhaps excited, perhaps frightened, perhaps both…He watched the girls walk. Considered. And slipped into a walk behind them, fingering the metal in his pocket as he went” (31). The powerful part of this vignette is that we never hear anything more about these characters. These girls and their fate remain a mystery, but we are left, anxious for their fate and desperately wanting to read more. However, even though Hamid resolutely chips away at our expectation throughout the book, he fails in the last chapter. By taking us back to the protagonists, he leaves us thinking about the protagonists and the protagonists alone. If he had left us with a different storyline, he would have been able to more effectively break our traditional views towards conventional plots.

Change, especially drastic change like migration, is something we have been programmed to view in a negative light. So many books, articles, and politicians screaming on tv portray migration to be a harrowing, destructive thing, with no solution in sight. Nasia Anam explains how public discourse often views migration as “apocalyptic” (653). Nonetheless, Anam goes on to describe how Hamid breaks this cycle. Exit West portrays one of our biggest fears – change – as something that is simply normal. She says, “This is perhaps the most radical aspect of Hamid’s novel: its insistence of defusing the apocalyptic by normalizing it and integrating it into the fabric of human life” (674). Hamid breaks one of our conventional narratives by portraying migration as something that can happen without being world-ending. Hamid best implements this idea in Exit West while Nadia and Saeed are in London. Tensions are rising and the refugees are scared. An attack seems inevitable while these foreigners huddle in their stolen homes. And then, the tension lifts. Electricity is turned on. The refugees breathe again. Hamid describes how this required bravery from the London locals and newcomers. After all, “courage is demanded not to attack when afraid” (166). Both groups were afraid, but that fear did not have to lead to violence. Is this situation realistic? Critics such a Goyal would scoff and robustly disagree. However, Hamid is still breaking our expectations and showing us how migration can be different than what we expect. (this whole stuff here is pretty weak go back there).

Hamid portrays this idea of migration not having to be world-ending by showing us on a more micro level how change itself doesn’t have to be world-changing. He explains this by saying, “How do we become comfortable with everything changing and the fact that we will lose everything we have by the end of our individual lives?…Optimism isn’t that I’ll live forever; optimism is that, in the face of a recognized temporary life, I can still find beauty and meaning and connection and something worthwhile”(2). We can still find beauty and meaning, even in the changing. Hamid portrays this point well in Nadia’s character arc. Throughout the book, we get glimpses into her sexuality, like her deep friendship with the girl in Mykonos(118,200). However, its not until the end of the book that Nadia explores her sexuality through her relationship with the cook. Hamid describes their relationship as slowly budding up in a natural, almost gracefully casual way (218-219). In essence, Hamid shows us that change, even something drastic like exploring one’s sexuality, doesn’t have to be life altering.

Hamid uses Exit West as a platform for our conventional narratives to be shaken. Yet, he almost destroys all of his work in under two pages. This novel ends 50 years later with Nadia and Saeed meeting again in a city that hadn’t changed much, and their meeting is one that leaves me sad and wishful of what their relationship could have been. What if their relationship had worked out? Could they have put in a little more effort? It leaves me solely focused on these characters, and, more importantly, desperately clinging onto the past, unwilling to accept the change that was desperately needed for both Nadia and Saeed. When we leave them slowly drifting apart, we’re excited about their new lives, and only slightly sad that they are leaving each other behind. We leave them excited for change, which is what Hamid is striving to plant in our minds. By having us return in the final scene to Nadia and Saeed, Hamid reverts us back to our original way of thinking, and almost solidifies our views, instead of breaking them.

However, Hamid has the perfect ending already written into his novel, just the page before. As we leave Nadia and Saeed slowly drifting their separate ways, Hamid transports us to a secluded village in Morocco where we find a maid who is mute and, most importantly, terrified of change. This maid, in many ways represents us, the reader. We are scared of change, and if you disagree with me there, you might be lying to yourself (food for thought). Hamid describes the maid as being someone who felt like her life was fragile and that she herself was fragile too. The maid felt like, “She was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing” (224). By refusing to leave her current life, the maid strips herself of the ability of finding better. She is too scared to try. The maid’s daughter did leave and accept the change of leaving. However, she still comes back to visit. We glimpse into a meeting where they sit, drinking coffee while “Look[ing] out at the reddening dust rising in the south” (225). This imagery raises up a feeling of something ominous approaching, and the reference of it coming from the south makes us wonder if this foreboding thing is the idea of migration. The daughter asks the maid to come. The maid says no, but she gives her daughter’s hand a kiss, a kiss described almost in an intimate, if not quite erotic way. Hamid leaves us with a kiss – our fairytale ending. But, this kiss is between characters who are not our protagonists. This kiss is happening in the midst of refugee movement. This kiss is a warning to us about the dangers of avoiding change. In essence, this kiss is a perfect way to end Exit West.

When I think about migration, my thoughts flow to harrowing stories and the collapse of countries and their economies. As a society, we have been programmed to think about migration as a harrowing apocalypse waiting to destroy our world. In Exit West, Mohsin Hamid turns this idea on its head and presents us with a new idea: what if migration can look like cooperation instead? Hamid also takes other stereotypes that we hold and makes us rethink them. Why should a book only focus on the protagonists? Should the two main love interests stay together? By challenging our typical views on certain topics, Hamid changes how we view migration and how our world should react to it. However, Hamid destroys much of his carefully crafted work in the last chapter of his book by reverting back to the typical stereotypes. Instead of staying strong, he folds to the (possible) nagging from his editors to end things with a pretty ribbon. Exit West, by failing to end on a note that continues to break stereotypes, fails to meet its full potential in changing our views towards migration and change.  

I

Goyal, Yogita. “‘We Are All Migrants’: The Refugee Novel and the Claims of Universalism.” Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020, muse.jhu.edu/article/758170. Accessed 06 Oct. 2024.

II

In this essay, I draw on Said’s meditations on exile to critique Mohsin Hamid’s representation of the migrant as a universal figure in his acclaimed 2017 novel Exit West. I propose that Hamid naturalizes the fact of migration in a way that evacuates the specific historical experience that generates it, rendering banal what must remain historical. Along the way, I consider Hamid’s equation of migration with storytelling, exploring how such a claim reorders our understanding of the novel’s relationship to place. I also examine how the refugee novel as a genre reckons with the difficulties of representation in relation to debates in visual culture, as well as in response to a number of recent calls to stage the contemporary refugee in connection with past histories of racial dispossession. Placing such efforts next to vital developments in the emerging field of critical refugee studies, I probe claims to the singularity of the refugee, as well as attempts to create itineraries of ethical and historical relation.

Goyal is looking at Said’s thoughts about the importance of viewing a refugee as a specific person in comparison to Hamid’s Exit West and his claim that we are all migrants. Goyal talks about specific problems with making the refugee a universal figure, including the fact that we lose specific historical context along the way. Goyal also tries to look at how the refugee experience is tied to bigger ethical and historical problems in our world.

III

Goyal starts his article by bringing up one of his main “They say” people, Edward Said (240). Said has a firm belief that the refugee should not be seen as a universal figure because that would remove some of the historical context behind the refugee. Goyal then explains how hes going to be looking mostly at Said’s argument in comparison to Hamid’s novel Exit West. Hamid has a main idea in his novel that we are all migrants through time and by how making the migrant a normal part of life, you can diffuse the abnormality we normally tie to immigration (241).

Goyal also talks a little bit about different authors who debate about the different between words like refugee and immigrant. One such person is Nguyen, another “ They say” (242). He believes in embracing the title of a refugee as an identity. One really interesting thing that happens here is that Goyal emphasizes how Nguyen feels the need to empathize super deeply with his feelings of being a refugee in order to write (243). Basically, Nguyen needs to put himself in refugees’ shoes. However, Goyal ends with an “I say” that the distinction between refugee and immigrant is not clear (243).

Goyal then dives into some historical questions, specifically looking at a “They say” from Toni Morrison who connects slavery and the deep south so the immigration problem in many places (243). The connection is that slaves did not have a home of their own, nor did they feel a sense of belonging in many places. Likewise, refugees often do not have homes and they rarely feel like they belong in new, foreign places (244).

Next, Goyal dives into Hamid’s ideas in Exit West and how a refugee can be a universal human and doesn’t have the be the exception they can be the rule( (244). Basically, they can become normal and not extreme. Hamid also talks about how migration and the ability to move between borders should be a human right (245).

Goyal talks extensively about how different parts of the novel come together to feed Hamid’s views on how our world should view migration. Tying back into his idea about how mobility should be a human right, travel is never a struggle in  Exit West like we might expect it to be. They have different ways to “transport” themselves, whether through their phones or through the magical doors. And by refusing to add the cliché part of travel, Hamid is also honing down on how change can be an everyday normal part of life. It doesn’t have to be extreme. This is also portrayed in the way that the characters casually change in the novel, and yet life continues.

This idea also ties into how, when migrants did move in the novel, although we always thought there were going to be extreme consequences, it ended up being okay and, although sacrifices were made, the people were able to be given houses and food and a way to rebuild their lives.

Goyal wraps up his article by talking again about how Hamid wants the migrant to be a universal figure and how the whole world could be a refugee camp, but Said disagrees and believes that in that situation, people would simply cling to their identities even more (255).  

IV

I enjoyed how Goyal talked about the interludes and how they showed that the world is always changing, not just the main plot we’re focused on.

I LOVE the amount of “they say” in this article. It really adds to the fact that there are so many voices talking, even though they’re not all directly talking to each other.

The rhetorical questions in this article are amazing as well

V

I

Anam, Nasia. “The Migrant as Colonist: Dystopia and Apocalypse in the Literature of Mass Migration.” Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University Press, Sept. 2018, muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/711837/pdf. Accessed 03 Oct. 2024.

II

1.  “British and French migrant dystopias illustrate the particular anxiety that results from the simultaneous fear of being overtaken by Islamic hegemony paired with the fear of being colonized by former colonial subjects” (656).
2. Books circulating in British and French circles show how people are scared about two different things when it comes to migration: they’re scared about being taken over by Islam and everything becoming Islamic, and they’re scared of the people that they formally colonized coming back and colonizing them.

III

I really enjoyed the way that the author started out by writing a very strong they say. Anam started out by emphasizing how many of these works place a large emphasis on a fear of there being an apocalypse that comes from migration. Then, Anam quickly adds that these works differ on how the apocalypse would come about. What does it actually look like for Western Civilization to crumble?

Anam then dives into the pieces of literature examined and looks at how each book portrays migration. Some books, like Locust Girl: A Lovesong talks about the perils that come with trying to go to a different country (654). Anam depicts this as being a colonization in reverse. The article then continues to explain how the basic idea is that this literature captures the idea that people are coming to Europe and people are scared that these new people will mess up their ‘perfect’ countries.

Anam then talked about how there is a specific fear of the rise and growth of Islamic growth and overflow into other areas (655). For example, if we specifically look at Exit West, Anam brings up the argument that the migrants are being dumped into random places and disrupting the people there. Anam emphasizes this point by making it sound like a ‘they say’, keeping her opinion for when she says it at the end, but she clarifies how it is a hostile location that our protagonists Nadia and Saeed are dumped into.

A very interesting thing about this argument architecture is that the thesis comes very late in the piece. However, although I was confused because I was looking for it early on, I do think at the end of the day it works really well because the author has a chance to introduce lots of other information before the thesis that is helpful for me as the reader to understand and to agree.  This point is also emphasized by the fact that Anam waits until the very end of the article to make the most impactful argument: That migration can be diffused and normal, not an apocalyptic chaotic nightmare. Migrants can be elastic and adaptable in the midst of a world full of people who do not want to change.

IV

• the author ends by taking an idea that was used earlier in the article as a negative thing and makes it a positive thing at the end: “Instead, the subjectivity of the migrant becomes one of infinite elasticity and adaptability in a time of global tumult—a truly utopian idea indeed” (676). I love the way that Anam ends on a very clear “I say” that plays on a twist of a “they say”.

• Rhetorical questions. These are awesome for making people think deeper and interact with the text without even realizing they’re doing it.

“Is mass migration a new form of colonization, or is it simply the only possible means of survival on our increasingly unstable globe?”  (657).

• Anam rewrites our ideas of words and helps us reshape our ideas by giving us new words

“he capacity to face apocalyptic conditions as simply that—conditions to which one adapts, as opposed to catastrophic civilizational collapse” (675).

V

I’m not sure if I loved the length of the intro. I think a shorter intro with a point made more quickly and then more support in some inro – like paragraphs afterwards might have been better.

Kaitlyn Parker

9/15/24

WRI 101

Suzanne Churchill

                                                     AI: A Thieving Tragedy

I didn’t understand the point of AI when it began to grow in popularity.  One Thanksgiving, in my grandma’s living room, my uncle and I started talking about AI’s purpose. He gushed about how AI was going to change the world and expedite productivity. In his opinion, it was vital for me to learn how to use it early. Throughout the conversation, I was confused. As a student who didn’t want to get caught plagiarizing an essay, I thought I had no use for AI. It seemed like a dangerous, slippery slope. How could AI help people like me? Realistically, it can’t. AI can easily become a threat that strips us of our ability to grow in our writing skills because of the enticing shortcuts that it offers to users.

AI poses a dangerous threat because people will always choose the easiest avenue. Why crawl to the top of a mountain when you could stroll down a street instead? With AI, its alarmingly easy to generate an essay that might be better than something you could write yourself. From the student drafting an essay to the corporate worker writing a memo, people fall prey to using AI as the easy way out. For my bioinformatics class, our teacher created a custom coding coach on ChatGPT to help us learn and write better python code. When I heard our class uses AI, I was shocked. Why would our teacher put the answers right at our fingertips? Well, the truth is, the coding coach is very helpful. I can give it my code and ask it how to fix my errors, and it will give me tips. However, this robs my brain from logically thinking through where my code is failing. As the student, I have to decide how much help I want and how much I want to learn by trying.  Kyle Chayka a freelance journalist, comments, “As writers, we are all prone to falling into lazy patters; avoiding them requires active effort” (3). It is difficult to avoid the pitfall of using AI incorrectly. As a student, it’s hard to use my coding coach without allowing it to do my homework. And as writers, it’s hard to use AI to help our writing without abusing its power.

But why should we worry about using AI to take shortcuts? By using AI in any step along the writing process, people remove the ability to grow necessary writing skills. Anything worth reading required a vast amount of effort, struggle, failure, and perseverance (Chiang, 3). AI robs us of logically thinking through what we want to write, and it hinders our creativity to express our ideas in an individual voice. Ted Chiang, an expert in AI technology, expresses, “The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration – but these things cannot be easily separated” (2). The battle to create art through words helps us write something good in the moment and write something even better in the future. Kyle Chayka shares a similar view to Chiang. She says, “Writing without the aid of a generative machine might be frustrating, even excruciating, but it does encourage productive logic”. The rewrites, the edits, and the mental struggle are all integral components to writing something worthwhile. Even using AI to write an outline or expand on an idea robs us because the mistakes we make along the way are necessary to creating the finished product.  Megan O’Gieblyn expands by saying, “The perfect word [is] always less interesting… than the one you stumbled on while groping around in the dark”. AI could potentially become the new easy way out. If society collectively begins to turn away from allowing ourselves to wrestle with our writing, we will lose valuable, necessary skills. We will ruin our chance to grow through the struggle.

As I’ve been writing this essay, I’ve wondered what I would say to my uncle the next time we talk about AI. Although I agree that AI is growing, I would emphasize the negatives that are linked to its use. I know I won’t become a better coder by letting ChatGPT tell me the answers to my coding errors. I also know I won’t become a better writer if I let it be my thoughts and innovation. And I also know that our world will not be better off if we let AI become the norm and creative human writing become the exception. So, let’s use AI with caution.

Works Cited

O’Gieblyn, Meghan. “Babel.” N+1, 2021, www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Acknowledgments

I had a wonderful conversation with Suzanne Churchill during her office hours about my essay on September 13^th. We talked about how my original draft had lots of different opinions, so we discussed how I could make my essay more focused around one idea. She also encouraged me to lean more into talking about my personal experience with AI.

I used The Writer’s Diet tool to hone my essay. It helped me find unnecessary clutter words like pronouns or be verbs. This was useful for me to help make my essay more clear and concise.

I also used ChatGPT to find sentences in passive voice by asking ChatGPT to return my essay to me with those sentences in bold (we did this activity in class).

url link: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/66fd9471-01ac-8000-b2db-bff83c8cce0b

drafting groups comments:

Alston:

I really enjoyed reading your essay! The introductory paragraph added a lot of personality to the piece. One suggestion I might have is to attempt to add a clear thesis earlier on in the piece so that the reader can follow your argument from the start. One suggestion I have is thinking about splitting up the 3rd paragraph because you cite a lot of experts. You could structure it by splitting the first paragraph to include Chiang and Chayka, then respond to them with your own ideas. Then do a separate paragraph with a different topic sentence using O’Geiblyn as the expert and respond to her. I like how you bring back your introductory narrative to the conclusion. Overall I like your argument and how you developed it. I thought your rhetorical questions were a good tactic to provoke the reader to reflect.

Eva:

Hi Kaitlyn! I think we touched on most things during our tutorial today, which I really enjoyed! I love how you start your essay of with a personal conversation/debate! And I also like how your sentences are varying from long to short ones, makes it really easy to read through! In your first paragraph you used a personal experience with AI which is really good!
In your conclusion I think you could end on a more personal note, just like how you started your essay! Maybe go back to the conversation you had and underline the “I say” part in the conclusion?
Other than that, I really enjoyed reading it! Thank you!

Honor Code Pledge:

“Pledge” KRP

Kaitlyn Parker

9/15/24

WRI 101

Suzanne Churchill

     AI: A Thieving Tragedy

I didn’t understand the point of AI when it began to grow in popularity.  One Thanksgiving, in my grandma’s living room, my uncle and I started talking about AI’s purpose. He gushed about how AI was going to change the world and expedite productivity. In his opinion, it was vital for me to learn how to use it early. Throughout the conversation, I was confused. As a student who didn’t want to get caught plagiarizing an essay, I thought I had no use for AI. It seemed like a dangerous, slippery slope. How could AI help people like me? Realistically, it can’t. AI can easily become a threat that strips us of our ability to grow in our writing skills because of the enticing shortcuts that it offers to users. My uncle is right. AI is growing in popularity and continues to become an integral part of our world. But just as I thought in my grandma’s living room years ago, our use of AI comes with significant negatives.

Why is AI destined to fail? People enjoy the easiest avenue. Why crawl to the top of a mountain when you could stroll down a street instead? With a few sentences, you can generate an essay that might be better than something you could write yourself. From the student drafting an essay to the corporate worker writing a memo, people fall prey to using AI as the easy way out. For my bioinformatics class, our teacher created a custom coding coach on ChatGPT to help us learn and write better python code. When I heard our class uses AI, I was shocked. Why would our teacher put the answers right at our fingertips? Well, the truth is, the coding coach is very helpful. As the students, we have to decide how much help we want and how much we want to learn by iterating. However, that temptation to finish an assignment quickly, get a memo out to your corporate team, or write an email is a shiny and flashy one. Kyle Chayka discusses this idea in his article, My A.I. Writing Robot by commenting, “As writers, we are all prone to falling into lazy patters; avoiding them requires active effort” (3). It is difficult to avoid the pitfall of using AI incorrectly. As a student, it’s hard to use my coding coach without allowing it to do my homework. And as writers, it’s hard to use AI to help our writing without abusing its power.

But why should we worry about using AI to take shortcuts? Anything worth reading required a vast amount of effort, struggle, failure, and perseverance (Chiang, 3). AI robs us of logically thinking through what we want to write, and it hinders our creativity to express our ideas in an individual voice. Ted Chiang, in his article Why A.I isn’t Going to Make Art expertly expresses his idea by saying, “The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration – but these things cannot be easily separated” (2). The battle to create art through words helps us write something good in the moment and write something even better in the future. Kyle Chayka piggybacks off Chiang by saying, “Writing without the aid of a generative machine might be frustrating, even excruciating, but it does encourage productive logic”. The rewrites, the edits, and the mental struggle are all integral components to writing something worthwhile. Even using AI to write an outline or expand on an idea robs us because the mistakes we make along the way are necessary to creating the finished product.  Megan O’Gieblyn perfectly expands on this when she says, “The perfect word [is] always less interesting… than the one you stumbled on while groping around in the dark”. AI could potentially become the new easy way out – from students writing essays to lawyers writing legal cases. If society collectively begins to turn away from allowing ourselves to wrestle with our writing, we will lose valuable, necessary skills. We will ruin our chance to grow through the struggle.

            From thanksgiving conversation to global debates, AI sparks controversy. Although many people fervently favor AI’s widespread use, we also have to consider the serious drawbacks. As humans drawn to ease and comfort, the temptation to trust ChatGPT as your thoughts and innovation is strong. What will happen to our world if we let AI become the norm and creative human writing becomes the rare jewels to hunt down and find? Let’s not find out.

Works Cited

Chayka, Kyle. “My A.I. Writing Robot.” The New Yorker, 11 July 2023, www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/my-ai-writing-robot. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.

Chiang, Ted. “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art.” The New Yorker, 31 Aug. 2024, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art. Accessed 04 Sept. 2024.

O’Gieblyn, Meghan. “Babel.” N+1, 2021, www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Special shoutouts:

I had a wonderful conversation with Suzanne Churchill during her office hours about my essay on September 13^th.

I used The Writer’s Diet tool to hone my essay.

I also used ChatGPT to find sentences in passive voice by asking ChatGPT to return my essay to me with those sentences in bold (we did this activity in class).

Honor Code Pledge:

“Pledge” KRP

Winter vs Summer Debate

When people discuss whether winter or summer is superior, one of the central arguments is almost always about the different activities to do during those times of the year. For the summer, those activities are diverse and oftentimes outdoors. Taking a trip to the beach during the summer is always more enjoyable than the winter because of the warm weather, the chance to get a tan, and, at least for the next four years, more time available because of no school. The summer is the chance to visit new places and try new things that normally we wouldn’t have time for. Having less responsibility also helps lower stress levels and promote positive mental health. On the other hand, the cold temperatures and lack of sun during the winter can have a negative impact on mental health through seasonal depression. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, Seasonal Affective Disorder is caused by the shorter days and less daylight, which creates a chemical change in our brains leading to symptoms of depression (The Johns Hopkins University). Because the summer gives the opportunity to try new things and foster good mental health, it is evident that warm weather and sun is superior to snow banks and frost.

The summer truly is a unique season to spend time outside, exploring and enjoying nature. Hiking is a wonderful opportunity to experience the amazing mosquitos, sunburn, and profusive sweating of summer. Not only is the summer hot, its also a time of year when people have to put in lots of hours at work to save up money for the upcoming school year. This is an added stressor and does not always leave time for exploration and lifechanging experiences. During the winter, however, there are many holidays where the main responsibility of students is to relax, spend time with family, and listen to Christmas music. This time spent in a child-like setting can help people reset, relax, and lower stress levels. In addition, the cold weather does not always result in symptoms of depression. Only about 5% of the population suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder according to the American Psychiatric Association (Torres). Many people enjoy the opportunity to curl up with a blanket on a comfy couch and enjoy time with family.

Works cited:

The Johns Hopkins University. “Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Johns Hopkins Medicine, www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/seasonal-affective-disorder#:~:text=Seasonal%20affective%20disorder%20(SAD)%20is,antidepressants%20can%20help%20treat%20SAD. Accessed Sept. 2024.

Torres, Felix. “Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).” American Psychiatric Association, Mar. 2024, www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/seasonal-affective-disorder#:~:text=SAD%20is%20more%20than%20just,about%2040%25%20of%20the%20year. Accessed Sept. 2024.

Kaitlyn

Hello! My name is Kaitlyn Parker and I’m a freshman here at Davidson College! I’m from Raleigh, North Carolina, and I’ve lived there most of my life! I’m looking to major in something in STEM – possibly biology or chemistry. I’ve always loved math and science in high school, and I’m excited to be studying more science and math, along with branching out and trying new things here at Davidson! After college, I would love to get a job working in industry and researching! Outside of the classroom, I love to be outdoors and I especially love backpacking, exploring new places, and mountain biking. I also love to read and I love to spend time hanging out with friends! It’s not uncommon to find me setting up my hammock to read or at a coffee shop chatting with friends. I’m excited to take this class with y’all and learn more about how to write well and express our ideas through words!