My Experience

I can't believe it! It's been 30 days! I remember choosing the topic of my 30-Day Challenge, and how I had a hard time deciding it, and now it's almost over. I have had three topics before I chose to read news every day. Keeping a journal, and writing down everything that happened each day, stop using social media every day, and stop drinking juice every day. I have found the last two topics a little bit difficult, since I knew I needed to use the social media in order to contact my friends back home. If I stopped drinking juice it would help me have a healthier 30 days, but I didn't want to stop doing that. Keeping a journal at first seemed exciting, since I have been doing it every other day. However, the journal I have been keeping is in Turkish, so writing in English in my journal would change the way I keep it. I was almost determined to do that until I read a news one day online. Before I started doing the challenge I would go online, and read news sometimes. While reading the news that day, I realized that reading a news every day can be a good way to complete my 30-Day challenge. I could learn things, and I could also have fun. 

The first week wasn't difficult. Finding news to read was easy, since I knew which topics to choose. However, after first week, I have realized that choosing a news to read was getting difficult. In my blog post, I would always talk about technology, or science. In second week, I have decided that I would read more political news, and news that concerns everyone. The political news could sometimes get difficult to read in terms of their language. Since I didn't have an interest in politics, I often didn't understand those kind of news. So I stuck with reading news that would interest me—like technology, and science. 

One of the most difficult parts of this challenge was writing blogs once in three days. This challenge was also a writing challenge. The length of the blog posts scared me when I started the 30-Day Challenge. I never believed that I would be able to write 500 words every three days, usually about the same topic. Even though sometimes I was out of ideas, I think that I have done a good job in terms of reflecting on my experience through this challenge in my blog posts. Thanks to writing long blog posts, writing 500 words have become an easy task for me. I can finish writing 500 words easier, and quicker. Whenever I felt like I didn't have any ideas, I would ask my friends for their experiences, or their ideas about my blog post, and the 30-day challenge. For example on my previous blog post I used an example that is related to one of my friends' life. My previous blog post was about a volcano explosion that happened in Hawaii. I have written how after learning this news, I went to my roommate, and asked her if her mother was affected from the explosion or not, since I knew that her mother was in Hawaii because of a business trip. 

This challenge also made me patient. Some news articles that I read were very long. Some of them would be three to four pages. Reading news that long every day made me patient about reading, and I even started reading a book other than the ones I read for my English class. During the last few weeks, I was able to read longer news than the ones I read during the first few weeks. During this challenge I have learned a lot from the news I have read. One of the most interesting things I have learned was the news about the dinosaurs. I have mentioned this on one of my blog posts. The news was about how workers that work in a road construction site had found dinosaur eggs under the road. That news also made me happy, since those eggs were found before they were destroyed or harmed. 

While writing my last blog post, I am still thinking about how I typed my first words to my first blog post. I was worried that I would run out of ideas before getting to 300 words. However, I was wrong. When I was writing my 400th word, I still had ideas that I wanted to write on my blog post. I can say that I have more knowledge than I had in the beginning of this challenge. I am glad that I chose to read news every day for my 30-day challenge. This challenge helped me a lot to learn new things, and to develop my writing.