Who am I?
My name is Victor Tejada. I am currently a 2nd year Student at the City College of New York and have been working towards becoming an Environmental Engineer. This Portfolio is a compilation of all my work done in Writing for Engineering (ENGL 21007). You can find them linked in the header above.
This Writing for Engineering course has been one of the best I have gone through, helping me learn and hone many skills I never really thought about much until now. Let me tell you all about it in my reflective essay.
Reflective Essay:
I’m working on it: My Journy as your Student
What makes a Journy? It means to travel somewhere, so where have I traveled during this course? Of course, I have only really traveled in and out of campus to come to class all this time, but that isn’t what we are here for. For all that I have traveled into campus, I came to learn about what it means to write as an Engineer, and master skills essential to being an Engineer. This includes information literacy, citation, drafting, collaboration, reading, synthesis, audience, and the use of technology. These are all skills that we as a class worked with Professor Adam Bubrow to learn and maintain throughout his incredible teachings. Not only have we focused on learning how to utilize these skills, but we also gained experience using them through important assignments and projects.
One example of this would have to be my first assignment, the Introductory Paragraph. In this I was tasked with simply posting a paragraph and picture of our choice to the CUNY Blackboard of this class and interact with fellow students to learn more about each other. I had a good time thinking up what I would write. It was great to have such an exercise to start the course and make friends. It also helped me to know that my fellow classmates and the professor had at least a drop of insight into my life, especially because of the comments left on my post. Here are some examples:
Being able to connect to those people like I did through just sharing a few experiences and submitting an assignment truly did change my outlook on this class as a whole. Not only that but reading through reading their posts and comments, I knew I was going to have a great time writing for this class. A skill that this assignment would relate to would have to be audience. The objective was obviously to talk to our fellow classmates and such, however, I didn’t really think about it and wrote freely, from the heart you could say. This was to ensure that they would know better who I am. Though I can say that I did try to relate many of my interests that I know they may have had as people also in college like me.
Next comes the Resume I built. This one was more of a challenge. It is something widely used in the real world; however, it was my first time doing it. It really did help me understand my situation more; I had no experience. It was also something I never really thought about. “What HAVE I done?” was a question I struggled to answer through the beginning of this assignment. I was still able find bits and pieces of myself to talk about and build this resume thanks to advice from my peers and the talks in class we had about this assignment. There were obvious mistakes I did make, such as not specifying what language I was bi-lingual in, but overall, I think I did a good job in what you could say is finding myself. It taught me that I really do need to reflect more on what I have done and what I haven’t if I want to keep chasing new experiences and skills throughout my career. Though I did struggle with that I did manage to find a good Job Listing I was able focus on; an internship with the Eastern Queens Alliance as an “Environmental Justice Project Research Intern,” which was related to the major I am chasing. This is something that you could say relates to two of the many skills aimed for in this class, synthesis and audience. Synthesis because it was my job to search for a suitable Job Listing. Audience is another because it was also my job to focus on who I am speaking to, to try and get that job. Along with that relating the text of the Job listing to the Cover Letter I wrote was also an example of audience and how I needed to relate what they were looking for to me. I did this by highlighting the key words which I would have in common with the Job Listing in my Cover Letter.
After that we took off to the next assignment, the Lab Report. During the weekend we were tasked with conducting an experiment freely and investigate Dice probability by rolling a 6-sided die 100 times. This one was a great challenge in the information literacy department since we had to make sure to have credible sources in our investigation from the City College of New York (CCNY) Library. This was also the assignment where in class we went over how to use the library too, where the Professor gave us many tips for using it efficiently. This was also the first assignment which I submitted late throughout my whole semester in this class. In the end it was pretty simple to compile the data using the technology we have today, where you can look up a fully coded dice roller on the internet and roll 100 6-sided dice simultaneously. Though when it came to finding the sources, that may have been a challenge. Though we were taught to look through the library there are too many sources to choose from in the CCNY Library if I am honest. However, I did manage to find a good source to read where tests were conducted relating to the probability of the 6-sided die. It was also something that I didn’t have to worry about audience too much since whoever reads a lab report would likely be people like Scientists and people who want to replicate the experiment or use the research. This also helped me understand the use of the APA format to cite my sources for the reader.
We move on then to the next assignment, which is actually a Project. This was something that was told was going to happen from the beginning by the Professor, and that we should focus on getting ready by making friends. In this project we focused on Proposing the matter of constructing a Student Center in our CCNY Campus. This collaboration was a great experience in my book. Seeing my teams want to finish this project and making sure things are done correctly was an amazing feeling. Though I did participate in helping them any way I could, during the drafting stages, we were very organized, so I was left with doing one crucial part of the Presentation and Proposal, the conclusion. For this I did my best to look for many key points that a conclusion would need for such a project and include them. This was something that, compared to the position of using your information literacy and synthesis to find information and sources which some of my team underwent, was relatively easy. Though I would have to say that building the entire conclusion based off of all of their work is not easy in the slightest. I would go on to have to read the entire paper and make sure there the conclusion is able to conclude the main points they made effectively, and more so due to this being proposed to the audience which would likely be the Directors of the college. During the presentation phase however, I would have to reflect on this and say that I had not thought enough about my presenting skills. I did choke a lot and could have used more practice, but in the end, I am very glad that we worked so hard and were able to see our project actually win a vote presented to the class by the Professor to make sure people were paying attention to each presentation.
Lastly, comes the Technical Description. This was a project that was also foretold by the Professor and built up to. It was a presentation that would test the skills of our information literacy, reading, synthesis, use of technology, and especially audience. This was a project which we all had to present many times to the entire class through teams of three which would rotate to each presenter after a certain time. If I had to compare the feeling it would be like the first exorcise, we did in this class, the elevator pitch, in which we simulated having to introduce ourselves professionally to someone who may be entitled to hire us in an elevator or while walking, which would normally take around 60 seconds or even less. Though the presentation aspect of this project was one of the main focuses, being able to synthesize and exercise our information literacy were also incredibly important as we had to research these topics in depth and thoroughly explain them. Especially reading these sources to find things like interesting facts or crucial data that would help inform the audience and not keep them bored during the 5 or so minutes of presenting. In this project I chose the topic of Recycling as we were tasked with choosing a topic that correlates with your type of Engineering, mine being Environmental Engineering. It was something that really showed my growth when it came to presenting too since I did my best to not choke, make sure I had keywords memorized, make sure that I am showing interesting in the topic, and most of all that the audience knew what I was talking about.
In the end, this Journey of mine, with the Professor and all my dear classmates, I would say has shown me a lot of things that I felt I should have known at the time. These are all things that are used in the real world, and that I will have to make sure to keep practicing and enhancing, so that I can become a better Engineer through my career. There are also skills out there that I probably still have yet to learn, which I will need to keep going and face just like I did in this class. I can say this with confidence now because I see how far I have come since I started in this class, and I am sure others who have taken this course with Professor Adam Bubrow do too. But other than the skills I have and will learn, I will make sure to keep finding ways to gain more and more experience as I follow my path of an Engineer.
