The wild journey

In this brief essay I must evaluate my academic year in order to see if I had a good performance through the course of it. First of all, I must clarify that this has been probably the most difficult year of my entire life, because it has been the one were the biggest number of changes happened. I am from a small city located in the south called Punta Arenas, which is very isolated from the rest of the country, so life is very different, compared to Santiago’s type of life. It has been a waved journey the one I’ve been through this year, so I will evaluate it next.
Like I said, this year I had to adapt not only to the university stile, but to the city and living alone as well. Therefore the academic matter is not the only one, nor the most important in my life this year, consequently I did not gave it too much relevance as I went through it, but now is time to evaluate it.
At the beginning of the year I was very scared and intimidated so I tried to study a lot, but as the year advanced I declined my studying hours and the intensity of them. Although my grades did not declined, so I think it wasn’t a bad decision, because I was able to do lots of interesting and anti-depressive things that helped me a lot with my adapting to the city and new way of life. But, back to the academic performance: about grades I did average going to good, it wasn’t the best performance but I did exempted from all of my subjects the first semester. I must confess though that this year I did not dedicated too much time and effort to my studies, I concentrated on other aspects of my life, but now I am much more focused on my studies and I work with joy when it comes to them.
Throughout this year I have come to realize that you need to be in a healthy state, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, because that is the main reason why sometimes you cannot fulfill with academic responsibilities. This year I went through some very difficult times and I was emotionally unstable most of the year, and that caused that I did not go very well at academic matters, but the second semester has been extremely different; I have had some hard times as well, but it has not been that difficult to overcoming them. I have found wonderful people that helped me in the emotional aspect of my life and that influenced my academic results, which have improved a little bit compared to first semester, so my evaluation of this academic year is “good” and the one for my emotional year is “excellent”.

What Anthropology needs

Anthropology is a very complicated discipline. It needs constant evaluation and review, specially in our country where is a not very known area of study and it doesn’t bring that much money and recognition to the country and university.
In the first place, regarding to technology issues, anthropology needs it the most in the Archaeology and Physical Anthropology areas, because in order to get those studies and investigation done, there are many things kind of technologic that are needed to finish them. For example, in Archaeology you need sometimes a flotation tank to obtain the seeds and little pieces from an excavation and after thet, they must be analized in high technology laboratories and later, all the data must be entered in computers with complicated programs that convert the meaningless numbers into readable information with wich archaeologist can infer what happened in the place they digged.
In the other hand, in social matters I think that specially Social Anthropology needs to get a closer approach to the people it studies and not only as an object of study, but as people they are trying to help by doing the research that is doing. In strongly believe that that is one of the biggest lacks of current Anthropology, because the anthropologist puts him self in a different level that the person he is studing and that causes a very inconvinient situation to the person, because he or she feels like is on a lower position …. Of the anthropologist, wich finally will prevent the work to be done properly.
I also believe that we as social scientist must inform the community about what our degree is about, because very few people actually knows what Anthropology is about and what anthropolgist do. Specially what is their contribution to the world and country, I mean what is their purpose in life and in this society. I think this could be resolved by showing more of what we do in television, because that is the easiest way of getting in the mind of common people. They don’t read the scientific magazines where anthropologist write, so in my opinion that is the most important issue Anthropology specially in our country must resolve.