Hello, readers? I hope not to be too awkward in this self introductory post. This year, my senior year(!), I decided to take Japanese 101 primarily for fun! I'm an East Asian Studies major, focusing on Korea, so I've studied Korean for the past 3 years, and I wanted to challenge myself by trying to learn another East Asian language. And I opted to take Japanese over Chinese because I do occasionally watch anime and read manga, and I absolutely love Japan, so I'd like to be able to visit in the future and be able to communicate with the locals in their native language. 
I'm primarily excited to learn hiragana and katakana and to start picking up on Japanese phrases. Even though I've studied Korean for so long, I still find that I have a difficult time with listening and fully understanding what other people say, so I hope to really focus in on this skill now that I'm beginning Japanese. 
After a few days of class, my biggest concern is probably becoming comfortable in class to speak up and communicate with other students. I'm more on the reserved side, so I think this will present somewhat of a challenge to me. Another concern I have is creating a schedule to dedicate an appropriate amount of time to studying the language outside of class. With a thesis and post grad plans to worry about, I really hope I develop good language studying habits early on!
I think the appropriate word of encouragement to say in Japanese is gambatte, so がんばって！