Understanding who I am and how I improve has been very critical in shaping myself in recent years both academically and for the professional I want to be. It has not been easy this semester due to the lockdown caused by Covid-19 and the distance it created among the teachers and students. My school life was very strict and structured, but the relatively more freedom of college has made me a little slower than I expected. This along with distance learning has made it much harder to get work done on time and be consistent. Non the less, I was able to learn quite a bit in all my courses and especially in this class which I believe will directly benefit me in my profession. I learned to write proper Technical Essays, Lab Reports, and do Engineering Proposals. Even though this was just an introduction to the topics, having an idea and practicing upon that helped me to build a lot of confidence in my reading, writing, and drafting abilities, along with other skills such as changing my writing to suit the audience, thinking from the aspect of a reader, and helped me learn to improve my communication skills to get work done by collaborating with different people.

           I can feel the improvements that I have made this semester. The way I used to think and write has changed by reading more professional papers and this has given me more knowledge on how to write better in general. I started with not understanding how to write a proper hypothesis to now able to figure out what the hypothesis of an idea or experiment could be much more easily.

The clear and concise explanations of topics along with proper examples helped me understand and put together all my final drafts for this class. For example, in the draft of the Engineering Proposal, the writing we had done was not good at all. The grammar was completely messed up, the idea of the proposal was not well thought out and the writing was very unprofessional, which would easily make someone not take the proposal seriously. An example would be the following of the before and after of the same paragraph.

Writing like the paragraph on the left in a serious proposal might not always be appropriate or professional and stating how the product works more professionally would look and both much better. So, all the members went to the basics and restarted again. We researched the topics with more detail, error-checked every line, drafted it a couple of times before finally deciding that it came out good. Trying it the second time, using the professor’s notes, using different databases for research papers, and reading many different statistics has helped put all our ideas together and the paper came out much better than we expected. I can proudly say that with a little more polishing we would be able to propose it to an investor.

           There are a couple of things that were completely new to me and a couple of techniques that I got to practice after a long time in writing essays. Throughout the entire process, I also learned to think critically but in a different way. This time for research and technical papers. I realized when writing papers, you continuously find important aspects of the topic that would make the proposal stronger and stronger. So, if possible, coming back and changing things around could turn the good paper to an almost perfect one. Taking notes and making points of everything important beforehand really helped put everything together just like I did for the Lab Report Draft. I believe, that, single-handedly helped me put together clear and concise abstracts and conclusions on whatever assignment I worked on, both in this class and my other classes. This method of writing helped me write my entire Lab report and help me learn by taking notes of the better work my classmates did on many issues and try to put everything I learned from them together with my own ideas. This along with learning about thinking of the audience that the paper is intended for allowed me to write much better papers than I had written before.
Turning notes into a full informative paragraph:

           The biggest and the most important thing that I believe improved is cooperating with others on a project that multiple people have to work on. I previously have been in situations where I have had to cover for many people, in one case doing all the work a week before the finals by myself. I am extremely glad to say that this time this was not the case. I learned what it meant to have responsible team members who not only take initiative but are knowledgeable in what they talk about. The ideas and the opinions they gave helped me appreciate the idea of the amount of work that could be covered on time if done properly with communication and collaboration. A proper goal and plan along with good team members who communicate frequently and speak their minds have helped me learn to not always take on responsibility and control but to let others do their work and come together to put the work into something perfect. This experience has completely changed my view on group work and helped me understand why small teams and good leaders are looked for in small companies to big corporations to help grow the business and to reach new heights.

           Although there are certainly things, I need a lot of improvement on, the things learned from the writings to all the peer reviews and feed backs on all the different topics have made this class extremely enjoyable and helpful. Reading a lot, writing, researching has been a very big part of my work this semester because of all the science courses I am taking together. My improved knowledge on how to write better in general, writing better technical papers, and being able to read and understand research papers has given me the confidence to go ahead and work on a proper scientific research paper which I plan on doing in the coming year. I now know what to do, how to teach myself if I don’t, and how to write proper papers to hopefully be able to publish them one before I graduate.

The List of things I believed I learned the most in this class are:

1. Acknowledge mine and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
2. Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment
3. Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
4. Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects
5. Strengthen sources used (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)