When I Initially began this course I felt that I had a fair bit of skill in writing. My previous college writing courses had prepared me for all kinds of writing that I would ever really need to do in my life. I had written argumentative, persuasive, and informative essays. I had written responses to literature and I held discussions online with my peers about my writing. This previous experience made me believe that I had essentially covered everything I needed to cover to be successful in my chosen field, which is not itself based in writing but in engineering. I thought that this meant that my skill in writing would not be as important. This assumption was wrong. In Writing For Engineers, I was exposed to all the different kinds of things that someone in a technical field may have to write in order to have a successful field. Professor Rodwell’s assignments covered writing memos, lab analises, and making presentations which are important for someone in a STEM career.
The letter of introduction was the first assignment and was simple and I was able to use my previous experience from other writing courses in order to create a letter that both filled the requirements of the assignment (for me to introduce myself and explain some of my goals for college and beyond) as well as follow the basic conventions of writing and grammar. This assignment was also a good starting point for the course since it allowed me to personally reflect on who I was at the time and what my goals were at the time.
The second assignment was to create a memo for the president of City College. This assignment exposed the fact that my previous experience with writing were not enough for the kinds of pieces I would be writing in my career. In the memo I needed to identify a problem related to technology on campus and suggest a solution for it while also highlighting the importance of the problem and showing the intended reader why my particular solution to this problem is the best solution. In this assignment I did not do particularly well because the problem I chose was not one that had a real technological solution. It also wasn’t a particularly specific and narrow problem and therefore my proposed solution was not specific enough either. I had never written a memo before so I was not sure how I would go about identifying the kind of problem that would have a specific, practical, technological solution that I could submit to a superior for consideration. This was the first time that I had to use the writing skills I learned in previous classes, like identifying the primary audience for a piece of writing, with the skills that someone like an engineer would need, such as being able to isolate a problem and creating a pragmatic solution for it. This inexperience showed in the quality of the memo. However, this assignment was also a learning experience for me when it comes to dealing with this particular intersection of skills.
The Lab Report Analysis was the third assignment that we were tasked with completing and it required us to analyze and compare three different lab reports from at least two different sources. This was easier for me because of my previous experience with writing lab reports as well as the in class discussions that we held where we discussed what makes a quality lab report. These helped guide me as I assessed each lab report’s ability to relay the context, procedure and results of their respective labs. Analyses were something that I had done in the past so this assignment didn’t present itself as much of a challenge as the others. Another thing that made this assignment easier was my use of outlining which better allowed me to organize my thoughts and better put them to paper. In this outline I wrote my thoughts critiques and opinions of the labs which helped me score them easier. This assignment not only taught me the importance of things like understandability, organization and detail in lab reports but it also taught me how to look for them in the lab reports of others. This will be something that I will carry with me to future lab-based science courses.
By the time we started the final assignment the class was made to participate in multiple online discussions about the assignments we had. These discussions allowed me to better understand the assignments as well as see others thoughts and perspectives on the material. It also allowed my ideas and approaches to be criticized by my peers which lead to an improvement of my methods and approaches to certain assignments. Since the assignments were online I was able to see other discussions that I may not have directly participated in but I was nevertheless able to look through and find ideas and approaches that I was able to integrate into my own work.
Our final assignment was to create an innovation that would allow us to solve a major world problem. This was a group task which required me to coordinate with other people in a way that was far more direct than online since we would be working with each other on a single project that we would have to submit together. This was an opportunity for me to work on a project that again required the intersection of a writer’s mindset as well as the mindset of an engineer. There was also the added element of the presentation which forced me to take the role of a salesman as well. The process of creating the innovation with my group was one that was rough since I had never been placed in the role of an innovator before. Even the memo assignment hadn’t required the depth and technicality that this one did. Despite the rough process we were able to come up with something to present that would fit the purpose of the assignment. We innovated on an already existing solution to the plastic pollution in the oceans. We took the idea of a large net that would be dragged by a large and costly ship picking up garbage and designed a new, more fuel efficient and self sustaining system that would do the same thing. We were also able to draw up a timeline that included our initial research and development periods as well as the area where we intended for the system to be used along with future plans to implement the system all over the world. In addition to this we were required to locate sources of funding which also helped us further understand what we wanted our system to be, a means of cleaning up large patches of garbage in the oceans that is funded by governments and environmental groups. My growth over the course of the was made apparent here because this was the best work I had turned in for this course. By the end a was able to use both my skills as a writer as well as more technical skills to create this innovation along with help with my group and it is evidence of my growth since the memo assignment.
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