Reflection Essay
Engineering for Writing was a required course needed to take based on my curriculum. Throughout the semester I’ve accomplished writing six different assignments based on the reflection of becoming a civil engineer. The six assignments were the resume, cover letter, interview report, lab report, proposal plan, and a technical description. These assignments were extremely useful and very applicable to gain knowledge and use in real life. They’ve also progressed my theory of writing and my thought of the process.
The first assignments we received was to create a resume. We were taught the proper information that was supposed to be on a resume and how to organize it. Another part of this assignment was to look for a job posting online and construct a cover letter addressing that job posting. A few important parts of writing the cover letter were to know who to address the letter to, making sure we properly convey our contact information, and to show how and why we were good for the job. By using the keywords in the job description and matching them to our resume and cover letter, we were able to do this. I think this project was very convenient. Before this project, my resume incomplete and never was updated. The instructions were clear on what we should include making our resume and cover letter.
After writing our resume and cover letter, the second assignment was to write an interview report. Writing was never a strong feature, so this project was the hardest one for me. I interviewed my father because he’s a civil engineer, which was very useful for this assignment. Interviewing and getting information from him was easy and interesting, but when it came to gathering the ideas together was the issue. I always had a hard time putting my thoughts coherently. Writing the report wasn’t the only thing we had to do for this project. The other part was to present to the whole class what we learned. We had around five minutes to talk about our civil engineer and when it was my turn to present, I didn’t feel prepared. However, I did get the general ideas across and described all important topics needed for the report.
Our next project was to create a lab report on the possible outcome of rolling two dice 100 times. Writing about the results of the dice I realized that there wasn’t much that you can say about the results. In the lab report, I used Excel to create the different tables of the data analysis of rolling two dice 100 times. After using the CCNY Library Database to find previous scholarly articles on the same topic, it became easier to write. Although it was still difficult because there was a lot of the information I really focused on math and probability. Therefore, I remembered the concept AP (Audience and Purpose) and combined both the idea of the probability of the dice as the purpose and writing the report for a scientist as the audience.
The next project on our list was the group proposal plan. First, we learned that in the real world when the request for a proposal they call it RFP. In the group proposal project, we all gave each other a job and properly divided the work that had to be done among us. Based on previous projects, we always had textbook readings to reply on if we needed more help, however, for the proposed plan we had to be creative and think of our own idea of improving the City College campus. We wrote the first draft and we weren’t satisfied. Therefore, we thought about the audience that we were writing it for and revised with the help of the textbook. After getting through the struggles of collaborating with others, I think this project was very informational. However, the other part of the assignment was to present to the whole class what we learned. We had around five minutes to talk about our proposal plan and when my group presented, we used PowerPoint slides to get the general idea across and described all important topics presented in the proposal plan. This assignment helped me get a sense of the type of work I’m most likely going to be doing in the future and helped me gain knowledge of how to present a proposal plan.
The last major project we had was the technical description. This project was stressful and time-consuming. The assignment was to either write about a process or an object that was interesting to us and relating to our field. Since I’m a civil engineer major, I picked to write about the Chrysler Building, and it was just difficult to write about it structurally. However, after using technology and the CCNY Database it helps conclude the ideas of how, when, why, and where the Chrysler building was built. Overall, this assignment was more informational and harder to gather most of the ideas together in a brochure.
Throughout the semester, we always maintained our focus to our audience and purpose when it came to writing out our assignments. One of the other things we had to keep in mind was making sure that our writing was kept in APA style, especially the work cited pages. Another thing that we worked on was grammar and punctuation. We learned how to properly use commas, semicolons, and quotation marks.
In conclusion, this class was very reliable and useful to be used in the real world. Most English classes I’ve taken never actually been applied to real-life situations and was mostly a waste of my time. However, I am proud to say that this course has taught me A.P, RFP, and correct formats of resumes, cover letters, lab reports, interview reports, proposal plans, and technical descriptions. Whenever I must apply for an internship or gain networking, I will retain knowledge from this class and used what I’ve learned.
