By completing this course, Writing For Engineering, I was able to learn important types of documents for my future career. I was thought new things about writing, and I have refreshed my memory about parts of writing that I already knew. This essay will be about my development as a writer and to an extent of what I have achieved on the course learning objectives.

One of the hardest parts of this class was managing my time. Working full time and being a student at the same time is difficult especially when you have deadlines. I have not found a solution to this problem yet, but I am working on it. So, when I had to complete an essay, I would just isolate myself in a space with no noise or traffic and I would try to focus and make the most out of the time available.

What I used to do, before starting a new assignment, was to just start writing right away, and most of the time that would not go as expected. During this class, I learned, and I tried to perfectionate strategies for creating a good paper. Drafting, is one of the important steps towards a well writing. Making an outline and creating a first draft based on it, helps to give a shape to your ideas. Revising and editing the document makes the text solid and proofreading, which is the very last stage of the writing process, fixes minor spelling and punctuations mistakes. By doing so in each assignment given, I started getting better at it and my process of writing started to improve.

Our professor was a huge help in making this class easier and more fun. She gave us the freedom to write about anything we were interested or were passionate about. Mostly for this class I had to locate appropriate sources within CUNY database, and if I knew how to do that from English 110, now it was easier to navigate through the platform. For instance, when doing the lab report analysis, I chose two subjects that I love the most. As I was previously studying about different food industries, I decided to go with two lab reports, one about making cheese and the other one about wine. What a perfect and delicious combination! When doing the examination, I did not only learn how a complete lab report should look like and its main purpose, but I also got better at comparing and contrasting.

One of my favorite paper was, indeed, the technical description. Again, I went for an item that looked impressive from my point of view and which was not a common appliance in people’s houses but one that loves baking would have it in their kitchen, a bread maker machine. I never did this kind of research before, so this type of document was totally new for me. My instructor gave and explain us the structure of it with the parts that we should focus on and after few in-class-discussions, I managed to clear out any confusion that I had about it. During this assignment, I made progress with summarizing and evaluating my sources so I can then paraphrase the information and added into my essay. I studied more in depth about how to incite text my sources, how to label figures and tables and not the last, how to make a reference page according to APA style.

The last assignment given was more complex and implied teamwork. Me and my team had to came up with an engineering innovation that filled a void that our community has and that came with a lot of research and time spent. The assignment had two parts, a written proposal, and the oral presentation. In order for us to work as a team and agree about the content of the paper, we made use of Google Docs and Google Slides. That allowed us to see the material added from each of us and to revise or edit it whenever it was the case. It helped a lot because I could see daily the progress of our project. Again, the professor made sure that each of us understands the importance of this assignment. As future engineers we might want to invent things to solve problems on a local or global level and to know how to put these ideas in a presentation would be a great skill. As I said earlier, it was a group project, and I could not have done this without the help of my team. During our in class-workshop sessions, we identified our strengths and based on that we distributed the tasks. For me was extremely challenging because of lack of time but having faith and the support of my peers we made it through, and we created an interesting project.

I truly dislike the remote learning but taking this class was better than I expected. As we were adapting with learning from home situation, this semester we used different platforms and we tried to make the most out of it. Sometimes, during our classes on Zoom, I would be grouped with different people in break out rooms and we would discuss and help each other whenever it was the case. I would always get constructive feedback from my peers and my professor after a first draft of our essays. I think my communication skills also got improved thanks to these brainstorming meetings.

All in all, this course was extremely beneficial to me, it helped to be more creative. Even though I have put a lot of effort into my papers, it was totally worth it. I know that there are still areas for improvement, but we are always in a process of learning. It does not matter the age or what we are study, there is always place for more knowledge.  And now to respond to the existential question: “What is writing?” It is an essential skill that makes our thinking and learning visible and permanent.

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