A Closed Chapter, Worth going back to: A Reflection on Writing for Engineering Course

 

Introduction

          Writing for Engineering has significantly improved my writing skills. I have learned more than as I initially expected from this course, and acquired many skills that will help me in my academic career as well as in my professional career. I have learned how to convert my brainstormed ideas into first draft and through editing and revising turn that into final draft. I have a better understanding of how to research using credible sources, how and when to cite them in APA style. Also I learned to write for specific audiences and purposes. There were five major assignments in this course: interview report, resume and cover letter, lab report, proposal, and technical description. After finishing these assignments, I can say that I have learned new writing techniques which have great importance in my future profession. The writing process in this course has made me confident in my writing and getting my voice heard through my writing.

 

Interview Report

          The interview report was the first writing assignment, which was divided into three parts. First, we had to connect with a practicing engineer from our respective fields, and do an informational interview about their work life. Second, we had to write an interview report and finally, we had to do a presentation based on our experience. Before starting the hunt for a chemical engineer, I thought it would be nearly impossible to find someone who would agree to take the time out of their busy schedule to respond to a stranger’s email. So, my initial step was to create a LinkedIn account to connect with chemical engineers. Meanwhile, I informed my family and friends about my hunt for a chemical engineer. Consequently, my father told me about one of our distant relatives, Ms. Mousumi Ahmed, who lives in Virginia and is a chemical engineer. As I emailed Ms. Ahmed, she gave me her phone number. After talking to her over the phone, I got to know that she was coming to visit her brother in New York. So, without wasting the opportunity I invited her for lunch, and she agreed to meet in a local Thai restaurant. Before doing the interview, I prepared some questions to ask her. As in a class exercise, we worked in a group to discuss what are good and bad questions to ask during an informational interview.  We also shared some of the questions on BlackBoard discussion. The interview was informal and went very smoothly. Her stories about choosing chemical engineering as a profession, first job experience, and her current job experience were very insightful. It was very inspiring to see a successful woman chemical engineer in a male dominated field. From her workday overview, I gained a better understanding of what are the duties of chemical engineers in a company like the United Technology Corporation/Carrier Corporation. From the hiring process in the company, I got an understanding of what to expect when I look for an entry level job. Also, she gave me some valuable advice such as developing soft skills, learning how to communicate with ease, and grab every opportunity that comes my way. So, I emailed her with a thank you note the next day of our meeting, which was a part of this assignment. As I took a lot of notes during the interview, my first draft was about ten pages. While editing the report, I took the first step towards concise writing. So my final draft was seven pages as I took out the unnecessary parts out of the report. For the last part of the assignment, I had to face my fear of public speaking. Because I’m an introvert person, it has always been my weakness. Although, the presentation wasn’t up to my expectation, I presented all the information precisely and answered the questions of my classmates. So, this assignment marked the beginning of my improvement in communication skills. Overall, this assignment gave me the best experience of the semester as I got to envision myself as a chemical engineer.

 

Resume and Cover Letter

          Resume is the first impression of a person provided to a potential employer, which highlights someone’s skills, qualities and experiences. On the other hand, cover letter is used to target a job, and an employer in a specific way, as well as serves as a unique opportunity of showcasing one’s writing skills. Thus, it is very important to have great resume and cover letter that would catch the attention of an employer. I already had a resume and cover letter, however, the ability of catching an employer’s attention using these was questionable. Therefore, it was high time for me to build a strong resume and cover letter as I was planning to apply for internships. We were required to submit a resume, cover letter, and an internship posting from our specific fields as our second assignment. As I already had a resume, I had to add some information, edit some part, and finally, worked on the format so that it looks clean and easy to follow. The given sample resumes and cover letters on the textbook helped me to decide what and how to include the information. I decided to re-write my cover letter because my previous cover letter was not strong enough. Through this process I have learned one very important thing and that is tailoring resume and cover letter for each internship or job based on the requirements of the position. After getting back the graded resume, I realized that I have issues with punctuation, specifically hyphens and dashes. So, I reviewed some of the punctuation rules. The lesson on punctuation was very helpful in refreshing my knowledge of punctuation. These little things make a huge difference because a wrong punctuation mark can completely change the meaning of a sentence and often very critical to help readers to clearly understand our intended meaning. So, now I have a strong resume and cover letter that are also approved by the CCNY Career and Professional Development Institute (CPDI). I used my cover letter and resume to apply for internships and have earned a few interview opportunities. Because of my resume and cover letter I’ve secured a Data Collection Intern position in the NYC Center for Materials Reuse research program for winter, 2018.

 

Lab Report

          Rolling two dice is a fast, easy, and fun probability experiment. Our third assignment was writing a lab report based on a conducted experiment using two dice. We were given the opportunity to design our own experiments. For my experiment, I used two cubic dice, and two plastic glasses. I designed and performed the experiment to determine whether the probability of getting different sums from two rolling dice had equal possibility. I recorded the data acquired from 500 dice throws in an Excel Spreadsheet with four columns: number of dice thrown, number on die one, number on die two, and sum of dice. Along with doing a practical experiment, I also used built-in functions such as RANDBETWEEN, FREQUENCY in Microsoft Excel and conducted the same experiment. After performing and analyzing the experiment, I concluded that seven was most probable sum of two rolled dice. So, I compared the results of both in my lab report and it turned out that both experiment supported my prediction. In addition to that, I researched for some scholarly articles to compare my results with experts’ results who have conducted the same type of experiments. In the research process, I’ve used CCNY Library Database, which provided an easy and quick access to reliable resources. So, I found the articles retrieved from the database very helpful. Also, I used APA citation format to cite all the articles that I used for this lab report. Throughout the writing process, I made sure my lab report has a specific type of structure and to maintain that I referred to the textbook for subheading. This lab report was very similar to my general chemistry and physics lab reports but was different compared to the lab reports that I did for my introductory chemical engineering  class.

 

Proposal

          Writing a proposal to improve something in CCNY was an interesting project. I had no idea about the format of proposals or how it should look like, so it was a great learning experience. Also, I collaborated with three of my friends, which made it more fascinating. Collaborating with fellow students have both advantages as well as disadvantages. The advantages include sharing of knowledge, less workload, learning how to see things from different perspectives, give and take constructive criticism, being respectful, and considerate. On the other hand, one disadvantage could be having irresponsible team members. It was very important to have a productive team, who work together to reach the goal on time. Fortunately, I had great group members, who are responsible and are willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. We decided to propose bathroom facility improvement as most of the bathrooms are in unsanitary condition, and we believe that it is students’ right to have a safe and sanitary bathroom. We named our group as “The Powder Room Patrol” and started working on it from day one. Our purpose was to highlight the issues with bathroom facilities and we provided the plans and budget to solve the issues. We divided the writing, so each person was responsible for a specific section, while all of us were open to help each other when needed. I was in charge of completing the action plan. We created and shared a Google Docs and Google Sheet, where we added all our information. So, all group members had access to them. We contacted some contractors, custodians, and different companies through phone calls, in-person meeting in their offices, and emailing to make sure we have accurate information. Again, a huge part of our research was done using library data base. Once we finished writing our parts, we combined everything together and added a work cited page with APA style citation. The goal of our editing process was to make sure the whole proposal doesn’t reflect different writing styles and it’s well-organized so that the audience can easily understand it. Once we were done with editing, we started preparing our PowerPoint presentation. To complete everything on time, we met outside of class, helped each other and had fun while doing so. It is very important to be an excellent team-player and have the adaptability to work with people in any given situation. At the end, through voting our team came in second place, which means our hard work and ideas were appreciated by the audience. In brief, it was a great experience because I learned a new format of writing, worked efficiently in a group and polished my public speaking skills through presentation.

 

Technical Description

          The last assignment was a technical description, where we were given the option to choose a specific object or process related to our majors and write about how the object or process were developed as well as their functions. This was my second favorite assignment among all the assignments that we did in this course, because I explored a process that I’m interested to be a part of in the future. The topic of my technical description was New York City’s drinking water supply system. I went to two information sessions held by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), where the speakers (junior and senior chemical engineers) talked about their experiences of working towards providing 8.5 million New Yorkers clean, safe, and high-quality drinking water. I found it very fascinating as I was always curious about how do we get the tap water. So, to complete the assignment, I researched using library database to get the water supply report of each year. Through research I got the answers of most of my questions such as where are the sources of water, how does it gets purified, and finally how does the distribution system works. Before writing the description, I considered the audience and purpose. The audience were my classmates and professor, while the purpose of this description was to inform them about the process of getting water from reservoirs to taps. I carefully defined all the fancy terms so that the audience can understand. Also as always I took some inspiration from the sample technical descriptions from the textbook. The challenging part of this assignment was formatting the description. I wanted to format it in such a way so that it has a smooth flow and the audiences can easily understand the process. Also, it was a challenging task to fit all information in two pages, but that’s where concise writing and Microsoft Word skills played crucial roles. We presented our information as the last part of the assignment. I prefer PowerPoint presentation because it’s a great way of engaging the audience as many people are visual learners and with visuals such as pictures, graphs, and flowcharts the information becomes interesting . Also, it helps the presenter to be more organized. Since I love to make PowerPoint presentation, I enjoyed creating and presenting it to the class.

 

Conclusion

          It is hard to believe that the Writing for Engineering learning journey has come to an end. I always strive to achieve perfection in whatever I do. I have high standards for myself, so I get disappointed if I don’t achieve my goals. To avoid disappointment sometimes I make things complicated and put in a lot of effort. In one of the first in-class activities of the course, we shared our weakness in writing, and I mentioned that I have the tendency of writing more than required. But as I look back at the writing that I have done for this course, I am very content that I have started writing concisely. From submitting a seven-page interview report to a two-page technical description, I have learned how to convey my thoughts using the right words. Free writing has been one of my favorite hobbies ever since I started writing. Thus, it was a challenge to follow specific writing formats, especially because it has been over a year since I took my last writing intensive course. I have successfully learned how to incorporate my freewriting into specific formats. In addition to that, I learned that having a two-part title is very useful in grabbing an audience’s attention, as the first part makes them curious while the second part provides a clear idea of what to expect from the essay/paper. Lastly, I am very thankful that I took the class with one of the best professors in CCNY. Professor Bubrow’s guidance was crucial in improving my writing skills. His teaching technique made learning easy and interesting. I am happy that I took this class at this point of my academic career because I will use all the developed skills from this course in my academic as well as professional career.