Reflective Essay

Reflective Essay

Chase Eckert 

English 1302 

Professor Hammett 

May 8, 2026

Reflective Essay

My original plan for my last two years in high school was to dual enroll both years. However, that did not happen. When I was enrolling for my junior year, the counselors scared me out of dual enrollment classes. In reality I had nothing to be scared of. I was perfectly capable of dual enrolling both years, but I am happy with the way things worked out. The reason for that is, I have matured a lot in the past year and I believe my junior self would be unable to complete this course the way I did as a senior. 

My topic throughout the whole semester was obesity. I chose this because I like to be an active person myself and truly believe as a country we can significantly lower obesity rates. I had to do more research than I ever have in order to fully complete project one. I learned about the body and how people should ideally lose weight. I had never heard of time restricted eating (TRE) until I was doing research even though it appears to be a valid way of losing weight. Ozempic were one of the main ways I found to end obesity. However, Ozempic is very expensive considering you have to do it monthly. I argued against surgeries to alter the stomach. I saw too many issues with that and the whole idea of altering the chemistry and size of the stomach is something I find hard to agree with. I believe everyone should strive for better health, not just people labeled obese. 

For the second paper I chose to go into depth about what absurd author Franz Kafka would believe about obesity. This was a challenge due to Kafka’s work being old and all translated from French. This paper challenged me to think deeply and outside of the box. I choose to write about the social normalities and stereotypes people give obese people. I concluded that Franz Kafka would be against the standard. Many absurdists don’t believe in stereotyping to begin with. Absurdity revolves around humans not having purpose and the inability to find it. Kafka would most likely not care about people being obese and he would argue everyone is flawed in different ways. 

We were told absurdity would be a main focus of this course and that statement was correct. We analyzed several absurd works such as: The Birds, Le Peste, and Metamorphosis. These are all complex works with hidden meanings and many possible interpretations. The idea of absurdity is very deep and I believe my junior self would not have been able to best interpret it. The idea of life being meaningless is a difficult topic for anyone at any age. It makes you question your life and think deeply, an idea that junior me would have struggled with more than me now. This course brought me many challenges. Thinking deeply is a skill everyone should be able to have and questioning yourself is better than most people believe. I believe I was able to learn more about myself along with the genre of absurdity.