My name is Emily, and I’m originally from upstate New York, but I attended middle and high school in Yokohama, Japan. I studied at Yokohama International School, and I am currently a rising sophomore at New York University (NYU).
I took the higher level Business Management course with Pamoja. At NYU, I am studying Media, Culture and Communication which is essentially a combination of media theory and communication studies. My favourite part of the Pamoja course was the flexibility that it offered me. I really enjoyed having the ability to organise my schedule in a way that was most comfortable for me. Having the ability to choose when to complete my work for this course allowed me to spend more uninterrupted quality time studying for each of my subjects rather than having to split my energy and concentration between multiple subjects in one study session.
I think that after taking an online course with Pamoja, I learned how to be more self-reliant and independent in my studies. Taking an online course meant that I didn’t always have a teacher around making sure that I was completing all of the work on time, so I had to be very self-disciplined in order to actually learn the material and effectively study for the final exams. It was relatively difficult to learn this skill at the time, but once I started university, I think that I had a much easier time adapting to an independent learning environment than some of my peers due to this prior experience.
One very valuable skill that I learned from taking an online course with Pamoja was how to collaborate and work with others through an online interface. I think that learning the necessary skills to use an online interface in a professional setting will be very useful for my future career, particularly as I hope to work in the media industry which requires a strong ability to communicate with others online.
I would encourage new Pamoja students to find different ways to make the course their own. For me, it really helped to take physical notes on the topics that we covered each week. I would make an activity out of summarising and organising the information that the teacher gave us into a note format that made the most sense to me. I found that spending a little extra time adjusting my methods of studying to fit my style of learning allowed me to better interpret the material and prepare myself for the final exams.
Emily, student at New York University and former Pamoja student
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