A Day In The Life As A Quarantined Student Athlete

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I have been forced to move back home in my residence of Calabasas, California. It has been a once in a lifetime experience dealing with the corona virus. My tennis season got cancelled which was tough and I am also missing coming into class. This is my first time doing online courses so it has definitely been a transition for me. My past experiences in writing classes has been positive for me and I have always maintained to achieve good grades and write well written papers in my writing classes. I hope to learn new techniques of reading and writing, and I am not to scared of anything as long as I stay disciplined throughout this course. I believe my writing skills are above average. I also think I perform well in reading and analyzing text. I have done research in the fall in my urban sociology class, focusing on the behavior and treatment of homeless individuals in homeless shelters around Orange County. A topic that I enjoyed reading about was the article on Friendships among animals. The article goes into depth about how animals experience friendship among their lives. An interesting story that highlighted the article was how a long term friendship between two male apes named Hare and Ellington had been cut short by Ellington's death. After Ellington's death, Hare's behavior was visibly changed, and the researchers observing this described the ape as going into mourning after his friend's death. I chose this topic because I thought it was interesting to read about how friendships and bonds form among animals. The second topic I found interesting was the article on Social Groups among different animal species. The article focused on how different animals use grouping to help their chances of survival. A cool piece I found in the article explained that an individual ant may be weak on it's own, but in a colony the ants become much more efficient and stronger as the colony practices working together collectively. I chose this topic because I am on a team where my coach stresses the importance of working as a team, and I thought it would be fun to correlate my experience of teamwork to the research on social groups with animals.

Here is a picture of me playing my first college dual match versus my opponent from San Diego State.