This year I have worked hard to improve some of my core competencies that I felt could be better. The 2 competencies I have been working on the most are communication and critical thinking. During the halfway part of the second semester, I had social studies as one of my classes and in that class, we had to do an assignment where we were randomly put into discussion groups. In those groups, we had to discuss the topic of Islamophobia. Usually in group discussions, I don’t do much of the talking, but after creating a goal to improve that competency I knew I had to try harder to participate, which is what I did. Overall it was a successful assignment and the group discussion really helped the end result and my personal skills. During the first couple weeks of the second semester all the classes I was in had assignments where we had to know the difference between fake news and reliable news. While working on those assignments I used critical thinking skills to gather information from different sources, find biases in media, and make judgments based off of what I had previously learned. I felt like those assignments really helped me improve my critical thinking skills and become more educated in terms of reliable sources online.