Originally, I didn’t like writing at all. Whenever I would be asked to write an essay or paper on something, I would always ask myself, why am I doing this? Why do we need to be good at writing about things? Whenever I do write something, it’s always bad. I never get any good comments or grades on any of my written works. As a result of this thought process, I always just viewed writing as sort of an assignment that needs to be completed, and nothing else. During this semester, I did a lot of written pieces. Although I may not have liked doing any of the written assignments, I believed that in the end, I learned something valuable about writing. 

In the course English for Engineering, we had 4 major papers that we had to do. It was an engineering proposal, a lab report, memo group assignment, and a technical description. In addition to those 4 major assignments, we also had to have at least 10 journal entries by the end of the semester as well as writing the self-assessment paper.  

One of the assignments that really left an impression on me was the memo assignment. The memo assignment wasn’t a solo assignment, but instead it was a group project. The group was consisted of me, Angel Avila, and Quazi Azizur Rahman. For this project, we decided that we should have our topic be focused on the lack of funding that the transit gets. In our group, we decided that I would be the Topic Supervisor. This assignment left an impression on me because this assignment is where I learned that collaboration is key. There was a day where the submission manager included some information about bikes and taking the uber. Since, I was the topic supervisor that meant that I would have to make sure that the project is going in the right direction and not talking about anything unrelated. Due to that feeling, I talked to the submission manager one on one, and I asked why he felt that what he put down was relevant to our topic. He told me his reasons, but I still believed that we shouldn’t have that information in our memo project. We argued for about an hour and that was when I realized that if we kept arguing, nothing would ever get done. That we would eventually form a bad relationship with one another if we kept on going. That’s when I told him that we should talk about it with our research director. This essentially saved the team from falling apart. Although my role was to be a topic supervisor, I helped my group by finding articles and quotes that would help, especially for the recommendation section of the memo. 

The other main assignment that left an impression on me was the lab report. The topic that I chose for my lab report was “The Upcoming Future of Cars”. In this lab report I essentially talked about how in the future there were going to be self-driving cars. For this lab report I had to do many things that I weren’t used to doing. The first thing was trying to use library sources that would have the information that I need. Normally, I would only look on google and google scholar in order to find all the information that I need. However, as a result of the peer edit for the lab report draft, I went go to the CCNY library database in order to see if they had any articles or sources that would be helpful for me. The CCNY library database sometimes has useful articles that you can’t normally find on google or even on google scholar. As a result of look on the library database, I was able to get a couple of sources that I would be able to use in my lab report final draft. 

Although those 2 assignments were assignments that had left a major impression on me, the other 2 assignments had things to offer too. Regarding the final writing piece of this course, the engineering proposal, it is where I took a stance on something. In that piece I talked about how many have a smartphone addiction and that we can implement a new AI system that would force shutdown the phone if the user has been on it for too long. This is essentially me taking a stance on the subject that smartphones are a bad thing because it’ll lead to smartphone addiction. Many people will disagree with this proposal and say that they don’t have a smartphone addiction or say that it isn’t really a problem. Because of that thought process, I figured that I would have to include data and charts that would prove to my audience that smartphones are a bigger problem than they thought. By deciding to include charts, it allowed me to analyze them as well as being able to further my stance in the argument.

Overall, throughout the course of this semester I have learned many things. My perception hasn’t changed a great ton, but nevertheless it has still changed. Although there were many things that I have learned, there are still a lot of things that I can learn. Some being forming my own writing goals and audience expectations, enhancing strategies for reading and writing, engaging in genre analysis, or even in acknowledging linguistic differences. Although I may already know what the audience expectations are when writing a piece or even what I need to write, I will always be confused and stuck on as to how I would start to reach for that goal. I would always take a long time to really think about how I would start my paper. Even though I never really liked writing, this course was really educational for me. It allowed me to understand that writing isn’t only for classes, but it’s also where one can express their creativity and say what they usually can’t say. Moving forward, I know that I will definitely encounter more writing. However, next time, I wouldn’t be viewing it as something that just needs to be done. But as something that would allow me to express what I truly like and want to talk more about.