Welcome to My Page!

Hello! My name is Amanda Duong. I am a rising sophomore at UC Irvine, majoring in Biological Sciences. Although I was born in California, Vietnamese was the first language I learned and became fluent in. I remember my first day of preschool, and I was utterly lost and confused because I barely knew any English. As a result, my elementary school days were sprinkled with ESL classes. However, I now consider English as my primary language and Vietnamese as my secondary language. I only speak Vietnamese to my grandparents at home because it is their main language and I also do not want to forget the language as a whole.

During my freshman year, I took Writing 39A and 39B, so this class, Writing 39C, will be my third college writing course. Since writing has never been my strongest subject, I am nervous going into this course. To clarify, I have more difficulty in creating the content rather than the grammar and punctuation aspect. In the Language and Grammar Quiz, I was careless and missed a few questions, but there were no topics that I had to search up and review. I think this course will be much more challenging than the previous two courses in the series because I will now have to find my own sources and evidence, rather than being given the articles and books to quote from. Hopefully, after completing the assignments each week, I will build the fundamental skills and knowledge by the time I will have to start on the final projects and essays.

When I was a few months old, my grandma gave away my family’s two dogs because she was scared that they would bite me. Ever since then, I never owned a pet. Because of that, I was never able to grow up with animals and share the same joys all my friends talk about and experience. I became interested in learning psychology as I became hooked after taking AP Psychology in high school and Psych 9C at UCI. However, those courses focus on human minds. I want to expand my knowledge into animal minds as well.