Writing for Engineers: Reflective Essay

Yasiris Ortiz | 12/13/2019

 

I consider that Writing for Engineers was the best course I took this semester. I had the opportunity to take this course with Professor Adam Bubrow. He was very organized, professional and funny at the same time. He was always strict with the time, consistent with the syllabus and on time with each of the assignments. Something I like about him was when he used to say, “What’s out there” pointing through the window, and we replied, “the world”. I really thought this class would be boring, just writing a bunch of essays and papers. However, this class was totally the opposite. Each of the assignments that I worked on helped and taught me things that I did not know and that are essential for me right now as a student and in the future when I get a job. I could improve my writing, presentation, and research skills. I could also meet amazing people like my new friend, Aliaa. In this reflective essay, I would like to express and explain most of the things I learned throughout this course and what we did in each of our assignments as well as some lessons that I learned.

During this course, I understood the importance of getting to know my classmates and how to work with them. The first exercise for this class was to do a personal introduction where we got to know a little bit about each other. This assignment was posted on Blackboard. I liked this exercise because I could read interesting stories from my classmates as well as get to know students that are majoring in computer science like me. Our first assignment was to write a resume. A resume is an important document we use to find a job or an internship. It explains in a concise way our work experience, education, projects, achievements, and skills. This assignment was not too challenging for me because I had a version of my resume. However, I was able to improve my old version by following prof. Bubrow’ s template. Once I applied the changes my resume improved and looked better.

Our second assignment was to write a cover letter, which is another important and helpful document we use when looking for jobs or internships. A cover letter helps recruiters to know about the applicant in more details than the resume. I never did a cover letter before. So, it was something that I learned in this class. I learned the right way of writing a cover letter and the importance of doing research about the company that you are applying to. Part of this assignment was to search for job postings and look for internship opportunities. Two sources provided by Prof. Bubrow were Indeed and LinkedIn. He also explained the importance of looking for keywords that matches your skills and what the company is looking for and add them to the cover letter. In my cover letter, I explained my skills and reasons why I was a good candidate for that position.

In the meantime, in each of these assignments, we were developing and learning other skills like NUM83R5, punctuation, proper sentence structure and capitalization rules.

The assignment that I enjoyed and liked the most was the Informational Interview. This was my favorite assignment for the entire course because I had the opportunity to interview a professional software engineer. At the beginning, it was challenging to find someone that I could interview; but, thanks to a friend of mine, I could schedule a meeting and do the interview with Mr.Maniachari, a software engineer at Utopus Insights. The purpose of this assignment was to know more about the job that we will like to do. I learned a lot about how a typical day looks like for software engineers, their work environment and responsibilities that the position requires. I learned that in a work environment not everything is work and work. You get to know your co-workers, enjoy food and promotions. Along with the interview report we had to send an email with a thank you letter to our interviewee. Essential points I learned were to be on time, appropriate questions to ask and how to dress for an interview.

The next assignment was a lab report. I had previous experience doing lab reports from other courses that required this kind of paper. However, I learned more about the organization and the content in each paragraph of a report, the appropriate way of describing tables, charts, and graphs. Something that helped me a lot was to use CCNY’s online library. The lab report was focused on dice probability. At the beginning of my research, I was struggling because there was not so much difference in what everyone was going to write. I wanted to come out with something different. My idea was to compare two different methods of rolling a pair of dice. I learned APA, a formatting style for essays and papers, style for citations, the combination of sources and a better explanation of the purpose of my lab report.

The most challenging assignment of the class was the group proposal. My group was called “Smarnuts” composed of Aliaa, Sumi, Constantino, and I. When there is a group project, it is very important to make sure you choose the right people that you know will help and make fair contributions to the project. This assignment was about finding a problem or anything we would like to change in CCNY.  We proposed to replace the escalators of the NAC Building. We chose this topic since is something that affects students, faculty, and visitors in different ways. We had some ups and downs working as a group because not everyone was doing their own tasks. But in the end, we finished it and practiced for our presentation. We used power points, Google drive, and sources like surveys, and samples of escalators from other colleges to support our thesis. I had fun with this assignment because I learned the structure of a proposal and how to develop an action plan.

Our last assignment was to do a technical description of something related to our major and present it. We had three categories for topics, object, mechanism, and process.  We were allowed to use any of these templates: Landscape, National, and/or Gallery.I decided to use the National template. My technical description was about a Python program, traffic light simulation. I wrote it using the Graphical User Interface and Tkinter library. I wanted to share with my classmates and the professor how they can begin to graph using Python.

The big lesson I learned during this course was that not only doing the assignments and participating in the class will give you the results you expect. There are other aspects that have the same importance as the ones I mentioned and that I never paid attention to like, comportment, attendance, lateness, the use of the phone or any other electronic device during the class and reading the coursebook. All these things can definitely affect students’ grades and they are taken into consideration by professors. I personally suggest students not to forget about these aspects because they are important too. I also recommend students to read the syllabus in every class carefully.

Finally, I would like to thank prof. Bubrow and my classmates for such a beautiful, interesting and exciting semester together.

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