Dear Beloved UPP

Dear Beloved UPP, The 4th of September, 2013 the first semester at AUB began. It was a big challenge for me. I left my family, my town, my friends, and I came alone to Beirut to continue my studies. At the beginning of the semester I was very confused and afraid of AUB because I am a French educated student who doesn’t know a lot about English skills; for this reason I am now a UPP student. I recognize that UPP is not only a program that teaches me English rules and grammar, but it improves my critical thinking and advances my culture in different domains. The critical reading course was one of my best sessions during this semester. Before, I used to read only for spending time, and I was passing quickly on anything my gaze falls upon. However, now I am able to understand the articles that I read and get the main idea of any text. I learned an endless list of vocabulary words that helped me in my writings and my speaking projects. In addition, the instructor gave us some cultural sessions, a lot of articles about different subjects, and I did many discussion questions that enhanced my level in both writing and critical thinking. Moving to the writing course, by comparing my first writings and my last ones, I can find the huge difference between them. I achieved an important progress concerning the word choice, verb shifts and punctuation mistakes. I learned new types of essays which I didn’t know before, the idioms and the figurative language. I wrote journals that were extremely interesting because it was the spot where I dropped all my thoughts and feelings. Moreover, these writing sessions were very efficient and beneficial, and I learned a lot of vocabulary words too. The listening and speaking sessions were a combination of debates, discussions, listening practices and watching movies that improve my reading and speaking skills. My personality became stronger than before. Now, I feel more confident and more comfortable while speaking in front of an audience. In contrast, at the beginning I faced some problems with my pronunciation because I didn’t receive enough comments and reviews in order to enrich it, but now this problem had been solved. Furthermore, the structure is the basis of all the building of the English language, so two sessions per week weren’t enough to cover all the rules. Although I made an important progress in this course because I learned more about the tenses, modal auxiliaries, adjective clauses and other subjects that were very rich and beneficial. As for the science, the goal was to learn the chemistry and physics terms in English not only the theories. The instructor gave us a lot of exercises and his explanation was very clear. Likewise, the mathematics was very helpful for me because the lessons that I took will be very important and useful in my future major. With respect to the IT, the power point courses were useful to prepare my final oral presentation. In addition Microsoft Word and Excel were also supported in all what I have written during this semester. Finally, UPP isn’t a waste of time like some students think. It is a program that prepares student to adapt with the new situation of being in college. It gave me a chance to ameliorate my writing, reading and speaking skills. To sum up, I would like to thank all my instructors and I really appreciate the work that they did to improve my classmates and me. Sincerely, Remy Rhayem