“My job is to prepare you for what’s out there, the world.” When I first heard these words, I was curious as to what I will learn to prepare myself for the world. Coming into ENGL 21007 right after ENGL 11000, I quickly learned that I lacked many writing, communication and researching skills for the real world. Through various writing assignments, I have learned to tackle the real world, I expanded my writing techniques, taken other people’s perspective into consideration and gone out of my comfort zone in order to succeed.
The first assignment, an Interview Report was the most challenging assignment of the entire course. I had to locate and interview someone that majored in my major, Biomedical Engineer (BME), and write about how they became the person they are today. I was extremely confused as to how to locate someone randomly without ever meeting them. This was when I knew that I had to get out of my comfort zone just to start this assignment. I discovered my interviewee, Dr.Berteau, a professor at the College of Staten Island, who is affiliated to the New York Center for BME at City College and the nanoscience initiative at the Advance Science Research Center by using the resources available to me, the CCNY alumni, located at the CCNY website. After meeting and gathering my data from the interview, I wrote my report on how Dr. Berteau became the professor that he is today, which was the easiest part of the assignment because I had everything recorded and written down. I believe that this assignment has allowed me to gain a tremendous amount of exposure as to what is needed to be done to get a job.
The following assignment is a resume and cover letter, which was assigned in the middle of the Interview Report, which taught me how to properly format, and add necessary information to my resume and how to write a cover letter for a certain job application. This assignment was relatively easier because it was about me, and who doesn’t know me better me. At first, I thought that my resume was already perfect, but right away Professor Bubrow proved me wrong. In order to detail your resume further, you can add the courses that you are taking that is related to your major and include a branding statement to tell the person that is looking at your resume a little about yourself in a line or two. Once I had finalized my resume, I had to “apply” for a job and write a cover letter for it. In the cover letter, I showed the reader that not only do I fit their requirement, but I can do much more for their company. I needed to show that I can benefit the company more than any other applicants. All of this is necessary to get a job, but the two most important things to remember is your A and P; the audience and purpose. When you are writing a cover letter, you have to keep it professional because you are not writing to your friends, or family, you are writing to someone who is going to determine whether or not you will get a job so whenever you apply for a job, always keep it professional. Overall, this assignment has taught to me to always show off and try to be the one person with unique skills out of every other applicants, so that I can be the chosen one whenever I am applying for a job or an internship.
After that, I was assigned a Lab Report, where I had to experiment the probability of rolling a number from 2 dice. This assignment was a bit boring and tedious due to the number of times required to roll 2 dice, 100 times, but overall it was interesting due to the studies that I found while researching about the probability of dice roll. In this assignment, I learned 2 very important things: 1) when you research something, you can use the CCNY online library to find yourself primary sources by filtering it out with scholarly journals. 2) Always cite the information that you are using from sources (APA format in this case) in order to prevent plagiarism. In addition, in this case, the audience and purpose would be different from the resume and cover letter because this is an assignment that is going to be read by my professor, so it can be less formal, but still professional to a certain extent where it is not a casual conversation. Furthermore, I used Microsoft Excel to create a datasheet, and graphs of the number that the dice landed on after every roll to give the reader of my report a visual of my experiment. By the end of this lab report, I learned how to research using the CCNY online library, cite using APA format, and maneuver around Excel, which are all skills that can help me in the future when I need to write reports or organize a large set of data.
Just as we reach a bit over the midpoint of the semester, I am assigned a group proposal project, where my group and I, Team JCMW, had to pick a problem that is occurring in CCNY and come up with a solution to fixing it. This project was just as difficult as the Interview Report because as a group we are supposed to work together, however not everyone in the group contributed the same amount of effort which made it difficult to complete. We decided to work on the lack of food quality and variety of CCNY, which was a great idea, because based on the survey results, about 85% of the 52 responses were unsatisfied with the food in the NAC second floor café. This was an interesting finding; however, the main problem is that everyone was only working on this project collaboratively the week before it was due. As a group we rushed to finished it the day before which is beneficial because this gave everyone in the group to edit each other’s parts allowing us to better our presentation. Overall from this project, I have learned that you should always choose your group mates wisely so that it is less stressful on you throughout the entire process.
Following all these assignments, I was given a Grammar Quest, where I was tested the knowledge that was given to me throughout the semester. I believe that this quest was used to determine whether we, my class and I payed attention throughout this semester, like when to use a comma, semi-colon and colon. The quest was generally not difficult, and I believe that it was very useful especially towards the end of the semester since it refreshed my memories of everything that we have learned in class.
Moving onto the last assignment, Technical Description, I described the mechanism of something that I could be creating in the future as a Biomedical Engineer. For this assignment, it was the most enjoyable one of them all. I really enjoyed learning about the large variety of machines that a BME can build. Out of the hundreds of machineries, I chose the thought controlling prosthetic arm. First of all, I did my research using the CCNY online library, which showed me in dept how durable a prosthetic arm is compared to a human’s arm which was extremely fascinating because a prosthetic arm is way more durable than a human’s arm, so technically it is stronger than a human’s arm too. Of course, after using a source from the CCNY online library, I would have to cite it in APA format. Once I finished researching, the hard part was how should I format and synthesis all of information that I have found into two pages? It was hard cutting lot of details out since everything seemed to be needed to make it flow properly. After thinking for a while, I remembered that I have the best source for this course, it’s textbook, so I looked into the ENGL 21007’s textbook for a sample and used it as a guide. As I was filling in all the missing sections of my technical description, it gave the best feeling like a story coming together starting from its past to how it is now and how the whole thought controlled prosthetic arm works. In this assignment, I also had to keep in mind the audience and purpose of this assignment when writing it. Since my audience was my classmates, it was not extremely professional, but it did not have any jokes either. Overall this assignment has expanded my knowledge as to what a Biomedical Engineer does and how the whole process works while strengthening the skills that I had already learned in the beginning of the semester.
All in all, ENGL 21007 has been a class filled with difficult and tedious writing assignments, however all of these assignments were 100% necessary to prepare me for the real world when it is time to go out there. My writing has not only become more sophisticated, but also more diverse as I was required to do various writings such as lab and interview reports, which were writings that I have never done before. I believe that with the skills and exposure that ENGL 21007 has given me, I am ready for the world now!
