Abdullah Altamir

Mr.Bubrow

12/17/24

Writing for Engineering

From Mediocre Writer To Semi-Mediocre: My Journey And The Lessons I Learned In This Class

I’m sure the title pretty much tells you what I think of myself as a writer. Truth be told, I never had an affinity for writing. Thinking back to all of my previous classes, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed writing in general. However, I felt as though my writing was actually put to use in this class, even though I didn’t want to write(I’m lazy, what can I do!) So, to tell you about what I  learned in this class, I think it’s important that we go back and look at the assignments.

This class contained 6 major assignments in total, and I’ll list them in order here: the Introducing You prompt, the Resume and Cover Letter, the Lab Report, the Group Proposal, the Technical Description, and the Portfolio. To start off, the Introducing You assignment was my wake up call.  It’s where I learned a very important thing: Put utmost effort! I thought I could slack off in this class, but reality hit me like a truck. Then we move on to the Resume and Cover Letter, and I really enjoyed this one because of its practical use in the real world. Like all of the assignments here, this one required me to do some drafting, so I tried different templates of resumes and used the one I thought looked best. I got some really good constructive feedback on my resume, and after polishing it up a bit, I actually used that resume to apply for a Google Internship! That’s what I really enjoy about this class: there’s so many applications and things you learn here that you eventually use in the real world. The next one was the Lab Report. This one was a research extensive assignment, where a ton of reading, drafting and citation was required in order to verify and use our sources. Some of my sources came from using information literacy, which involved finding sources from CCNY’s library. While I liked the idea of the lab report, I feel like it would’ve been cooler to choose our own topic for the lab report. Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed doing dice probability, though rolling 100 die manually probably wasn’t the smartest move. The next assignment was the Group Proposal, and this was my second favorite assignment. I met 3 friends that day: Ryan, Rehman, and Nathan. Together, we were called the Rice and Curry Foundation, and proposed the idea of a student center to our peers. This required a lot of collaboration and communication, as well as consideration of our audience. To do this, we created a survey in hopes to get students’ feelings towards our student center. After a lot of hardwork, we finally presented our masterpiece, and I’d like to think that our audience enjoyed what we delivered! Now comes my favorite part of the course, the technical description. Choosing a topic felt amazing, and because I was so interested in Blockchain, I presented on that(which I must say, was very enjoyable to do!)

One other thing I really liked from the course was the extra credit play that I attended. We wrote a 2 page paper based on what we saw, and there were so many things to witness and understand! There were many dancers to write about, their movements, the scenery, the music, and other factors that made the play what it is.

I noticed that throughout the semester, so many of the course learning objectives were being used time and time again. As of right now, I’m using technology, and whoever is reading this, you might be too! The course learning objectives are also things that we end up using in the real world as well, so it’s important to understand their applications and how to use them.

To end this reflection, I’d like to highlight some things that were spoken of. There were key assignments that had to be completed throughout the semester. Some were to my liking and some were not, but that is all up to the student’s preference. I think a round of applause is also to be given to Mr.Bubrow, as not only did he make the class entertaining, he also set up expectations throughout the course. I really enjoyed this class, and I felt as though I’ve learned much from it.