A Brief Reflection of What I have Learned About Writing as an Engineer:

Reflective Essay

Introduction:

At the beginning of this semester, I felt out of place in this class. I felt stupid and inexperienced compared to the other students. I felt like I am in the wrong place and everyone is better than me. If you feel the same about where you are, then you are in the right place, actually in a better place. It took me a while to realize that being worse than others also means that I have the opportunity to learn a lot more and improve a lot more. I can say with confidence that I have learned something from every single person in that class. I already have the feeling that this course will help me a lot in my future academic and working life.

Resume and Cover letter

Resumes and cover letters are essential in the process of finding a professional job or internship. For this course, I had to write a resume showcasing my bio, skills, qualities, and experiences. In addition to that, I had to write a cover letter for a chemical engineering internship of my choice that would suit my skills and qualities the most. I have learned that when it comes to writing a resume or a cover letter, my audience is the employer and the purpose is to convince the employer that I am best fit for that job or internship. Reading the book, Technical Communication by Mark Markel, for this assignment, gave me many practical insights about the job process and things to keep in mind while applying for any job or internship. The resume and cover letter templates used in the book are easier to follow and look better compared to the ones from outside sources. However, writing the cover was a bit challenging for me since this was my first time writing it and also because I don’t have enough skills to show off.

Interview Report:

For the interview report, I had to interview a working chemical engineer and write an informational report on the interview. So, I sent the request for an informational interview to a number of chemical engineers and ended up interviewing one of them. His name is Gaurav Garg and he has been working as a full-time chemical engineer at Evoqua Water Technologies in New Jersey. Luckily, I got the opportunity to interview him at his workplace in New Jersey which was the most interesting and exciting part of this assignment. It was my first time meeting a chemical engineer. The interview was informative and it gave me a real insight into the chemical engineering field. The most important thing I have from this interview is the role of chemical engineers. For this report, I think the audience are those who are interested in learning more about the chemical engineering field. The purpose of writing this report was to inform the readers about how to become a chemical engineer, what does a chemical engineer do in general and skills and qualities a chemical engineer must have. The hardest part of writing this report was to come up with the first draft. Cutting down the long interview into precise and only useful information was a lengthy process. Then, synthesizing all those pieces of information was another difficult task. I found it very complicated to transition from one information to the other without losing the interest of the readers. I was not satisfied with the outcome of the writing.    

Lab Report:

I found the lab report to be the most difficult assignment because it took me quite a while to understand what was expected of me for that assignment. Also, it was difficult because it is about probability and statistic which I personally do not like. However, the process was fun because for the first time I had formulated a testable hypothesis and designed my own experiment to test that hypothesis. For the information, we were required to use a scholarly article on dice experiment which needed a lot of reading. While writing the lab report, I had to keep in mind that my audiences or readers were most likely to be people knowledgeable about the topic or scientific community in general and that my purpose was to provide them with unbiased result and analysis on the topic that they can use further. Starting from this writing piece, we used APA citation for all the writings. Synthesizing was the biggest challenge because the experimental data had to be compared to the hypothesis as well as the scholarly article. I had to explore around with the features of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word to make the lab report easily understandable and interesting to my audience.

Proposal:

I think this was the second most interesting assignment for this course. We were expected to come up with a proposal that will improve the services on the campus. We chose to improve the Technology services in our campus. It was the only collaborative project. I used to be scared of collaborative projects because I have always been the type of person who ends up doing all the work. I have experienced it many times and so I started to hate the idea of working with others. However, luckily this is a class full of engineers who are technically smart and hard-working in general. So, I only had to do my part in the assignment. Our audience, in this case, was the college authority and our purpose was to convince them to approve our proposal to improve the technology services on campus. The source of our information was the website of City College about budget plan for technology and IT services as well as surveys, interview with the IT and library staffs. Reading the book helped us to understand the assignment better and to work more efficiently. Time management is one of the biggest concern for this assignment and it will be for any collaborative work. The only way out of that problem is to prioritize this assignment above the ones that can be postponed. Synthesizing and drafting was simple and pretty straightforward at least for my part which was the action plan. I loved working on this project. Specifically, I loved walking around the library, collecting pieces of information by talking to people, observing the issues involving the IT services in our campus and coming up with cost-effective solutions to those issues.

Technical Description:

Here comes my favorite assignment of this course which is the technical document. The best thing about it was that we got to choose our topic of interest. I chose the Nuclear reactor named Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) for my technical description. MSR is a reactor that uses molten salt as both fuel and coolant. All the information I have used in this document are from scholarly articles so I had to read a lot of articles to choose the one I needed for my description. The reason I used so many articles is that when it comes to nuclear power and reactors companies try to suppress the media and people also have different viewpoints about nuclear technology itself. That makes the web information contradicting and questionable on the scale of accuracy. For the writing, it was crucial to keep in mind that my audience was general public who are not necessarily knowledgeable about or interested in nuclear fuels or technology. My purpose was to educate them about the Molten Salt Reactor. In addition to that, I was looking for ways to connect my topic to the audience in an efficient way. So, the drafting was a big part of the assignment as I tried my best as a writer to make my technical description comprehensible, knowledgeable and interesting enough to my readers. This writing assignment compelled me to learn a lot about nuclear fuels and nuclear power and has raised my interest in the nuclear industry tremendously.

Presentation and others

Presentations were a big part of the course in general. I tried to take full advantage of it to make my skills of public-speaking more efficient. I have taken enough time to prepare for every presentation. My goal was to go over every point that I wanted to mention and still finish on time. However, after the first presentation on the interview report, I realized that I failed to make it interesting to my audience and that the presentation is not all about mentioning all the points I want to mention on time. It is about telling my audience a story that will be so interesting to them that they will actually pay attention to it. There is no presentation that is perfect but one can be more worthwhile than the other and only a presenter can make that difference. So in my last presentation, I tried not just to educate my audience but also to make the presentation worthwhile to them and show them that I cared about their interest and opinions.

Conclusion:

This course has helped with my communication skills immensely. Although no one sat there to teach me how to talk, the course and lectures emphasized enough on communication skills which enforced me to come out of the fear of making mistakes. It is a very helpful course if one tries to do his/her best but if someone doesn’t take it seriously, then it will be just another required course towards the major. I have learned from everyone in this class especially, from our instructor, Mr. Bubrow. He is not only smart but also humorous. I will honestly miss this class but I guess that is how life is. We meet people, learn from each other and move on when life requires to move on.