Keith Rivadeneira

05/18/2024

Prof. Adam Bubrow

ENGL 21007

After the Dust Settles:

A Reflection of ENGL 21007

Throughout the Spring 2024 semester, I took ENGL 21007 with Professor Adam Bubrow. Through the course of this class, we were tasked with completing assignments that would aid us once we got into the world of engineering, such assignments were: creating a resume and cover letter for a summer internship, writing a lab report on probability, creating a proposal group project, and finally creating a technical description on a product of our choice. This class helped develop my abilities to conduct research, work within a group setting, and strengthen my writing through grammar and learning new citation styles.

The first assignment tasked to the class was the resume and cover letter. In this assignment, we were tasked with finding a summer internship listing on Indeed.com or LinkedIn.com and creating a resume and cover letter for said listing. I personally really enjoyed this assignment because it taught me how to write a proper resume for a job listing, which will be very important and helpful in the near future, and also introduced me to what a cover letter is. Before this assignment, I had never heard of what a cover letter is so being able to learn what that is will help me get a leg up in future job applications. 

The next assignment that we completed was the lab report. During this assignment, we had to conduct our experiment on probability and had to reference other peer-reviewed studies. This assignment challenged me on how I conduct research for papers and how I incorporate scholarly studies into my papers. Out of all of the assignments this semester, this one was the most challenging as I had to get a large sample size (100 results) and compare the results by finding the mean sum of all the dice rolls and relate that to how we can predict what the outcome of rolling 2 dice with probability. This assignment also had me scratching my head on how I could incorporate scholarly studies with my research; in the end, I decided to use those results to compare with my results to find any errors in my experiment.

The third major assignment that the class had to complete was the longest one, the proposal project. For this assignment, I was able to choose 4 other students and had a month to work with them to complete a request for proposal (RFP) to create a new student center for CCNY (City College of New York). I and my group were able to split up the work evenly amongst the 5 of us to conduct research, come up with a design and floor plan, and find out the cost of construction of this project. I focused on mainly the cost of construction and timeline in my group while assisting with the floor plan. This project was my favorite out of all projects due to me being able to get to know my group members on a personal level and be able to come up with a solution that a major issue that the CCNY campus has. This project spanned the length of one month and that long period to work on this assignment allowed my group and I to take our time to create the best possible proposal that we were able to come up with. Some struggles that we did encounter, however, would be finding a time to meet up and work on this outside of class as we all had conflicting schedules. In the end, my group turned to meeting online and working on the weekends together to get the majority of our work done and to revise each other’s sections to ensure that they wouldn’t conflict with each other.

The final major assignment that was assigned was the technical description. This assignment allowed us to have the most amount of freedom with how we conducted our research, how our technical description was formatted, and, unexpectedly, how we presented. This project was initially made for us to create posters to present to our classmates and inform them about subjects that piqued our interest and still related to our major. However, due to the protests on the campus, our campus was shut down for two weeks, which forced the majority of the presentations to be made online. This allowed many students to use other ways of presenting our technical descriptions other than a poster; in my case, I created an online poster using Photoshop. My topic was on 3D Printing and this allowed me to get a better understanding of a hobby of mine through scholarly research and how 3D printing can have so many applications. My biggest struggle was presenting online as I encountered issues with sharing my technical description which caused half of my poster to not be shown to the rest of the class.

In class, we also completed and learned about other objectives such as different citation styles, how to effectively create drafts and revise them, information literacy, synthesizing different sources into one coherent piece, how to target different audiences, and the use of technology in the class. All these different objectives helped us effectively complete our tasks. The main citation style we used in class was APA (American Psychological Association), which was a new citation style to me as I, and many other students, used MLA citations. We also had to learn how to create drafts and revise not only our writing but also our peers. This allowed us to ensure our work had as few contradictions as possible and made sure we were able to avoid any incorrect statements. Information literacy, or how to conduct research and read it, allowed us to use scholarly research in our work and this combined with synthesizing it in our works helped us strengthen our claims. Being able to effectively target our audience first started with us answering the A and P. The A is who our audience is and the P is what the purpose of our writing was. Answering the A and P allowed us to target our audience and drastically altered the way we wrote our papers. All of these objectives were vital for us to learn and incorporate into our writing because even if we did this while being unaware of the fact that we were doing them, being aware of how we’re incorporating these into our works allows for a better product in the end.

Throughout this semester, we were able to effectively incorporate the objectives taught in class into the projects assigned to us to better prepare us for when we enter the world. Through creating resumes/cover letters, lab reports, proposal writings, and technical descriptions we were able to get some of our first relevant experience in order for us to effectively enter the world of engineering.