My unique personality reflects all my different social roles. I am a student, worker, sister, daughter, and friend. Some of these roles overlap one another while others are used only with certain people. I always try to be responsible, thoughtful, caring, fun, and polite in all of my roles. Above all, this course has taught me to embrace the unique perspectives of my friends, my family, myself, and even strangers.
I constantly struggle to balance the different forms of stress in my life. My past, present, and future are reminders of what I still need to achieve. Understanding attribution and its role in my perceptions and the perceptions of others has helped me imagine what I can be so that I am better able to prioritize by goals, desires, and whims. I try not to guess the motivations of others anymore and I can focus more on those parts of my life that matter most to me. This will certainly help with all of the social relationships that I am sure to develop later in life.
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"Sociology in My Life".
Every new semester when the first day of classes comes around I tend to psyche myself out. I am going to stop thinking in terms of schemas. I realize now that many of my decisions were made based on general principles. Not all classes are the same. The more that I learn each semester the better prepared I will be for the next. By preparing myself early for classes, I will overcome my nerves and speak out more early on. Making decisions based on schemas is great for decisions that need to be made quickly, but for more important ones I need to gather more details before jumping to hasty conclusions.
I would like to open my own business someday. My dad runs his own building business, which I work part time at, in addition to the work I do at a boutique store. Now knowing what anticipatory socialization is, I find myself using it by taking on more responsibility, learning how to better handle customers, and trying to learn all they can teach me. I know that novel situations will present themselves in the future and by preparing early for them I can make the best of them. Starting my own business will present a host of new challenges, but by learning the industry standards and having a great mentor in my dad, I am confident that I will be prepared when the time comes.
While at the store I try to avoid negative attribution with my co-workers and customers. I have long understood that not having nice clothes does not mean that someone is poor or lazy. But knowing about how negative attributions and stereotypes work in society, I can stop myself from forming preemptory conclusions about people. In addition, I try to avoid ethnocentric thoughts and attitudes. I think I understand diversity and the different experiences of others much better now. It is too easy to get caught up in the values of my own society and forget that just because people have different norms and folkways than we do, that does not make less any worse, just different. I am learning to embrace that about others.
I did not realize how often socialization occurs in everyday life. From meeting new customers to remembering the habits of co-workers and loyal customers, we are all in a constant socialization flux. Meeting new people is great, but occasionally I meet people with very high self-esteems who think that their ways of life are better than mine. This sort of ethnocentrism is occasionally a problem while working. In life there is always going to be someone who thinks they’re better than me. When this happens I try to use attribution to explain why they may be acting in that way.
Nature versus nurture explains how alike and different my parents are to me. Both of my parents are introverts, which is what I am. Though we are all bad at analytical studies such as math, we tend to excel at the arts. This likely has to do will genetics, for I was surrounded by friends growing up who were good at math and more than willing to help me. I just have always had a penchant for the arts that overshadowed any scant desires for learning math. My environment was very supportive for excelling in analytics, but I believe my genes focused my interests on the arts.
Sociology certainly opens up a broader spectrum of awareness to the situations occurring around me. Especially concerning diversity and how society makes quick attributions based on schemas, sociology has taught me to be more open with foreign experiences and aware of what goes on around me every day.
