A Rewind:

Reflection of Writing for Engineering

A new semester at The City College of New York comes with new opportunities. Attending the course Writing For Engineering with Professor Adam Bubrow has been an honor. From the first day of class to the last, Professor Bubrow has provided us with the knowledge that will be applied in real life situations. Throughout the entirety of this class, I was taught many things that I wasn’t aware had such importance in the real world. The course consisted of 5 major assignments: resume and cover letter, lab report, interview report, group proposal report, and a technical description. Each individual assignment has given me knowledge that I will be applying during my continuation with college, and once I obtain a career.

The resume and cover letter assignment was the beginning of many projects in the course Writing for Engineering. Professor Bubrow thoroughly taught the class the outline and format of a professional resume, along with how to prepare a cover letter based on the job description. This was when I was first introduced to audience and purpose. Professor Bubrow taught me how to make a resume that was directed more towards the job description. In this case, the “audience” was the person hiring employees, and the “purpose” was to display my eligibility for the job. Also, he assigned us to find an online job application and prepare our resume and a cover letter pertaining to that job. Through his guidance and reading the textbook, I learned how to create a professional resume. After repeatedly drafting, I successfully created a resume that I will now use for the future. This assignment has taught me to use my experiences, education, extracurricular activities in order to professionally present it on a resume for jobs or internships.

The lab report assignment was the second assignment of Writing for Engineering. This assignment consisted of conducting an experiment along with a written laboratory report. During this assignment, Professor Bubrow explained how to use The City College of New York online database for preliminary research. The CCNY Online Database contains a vast amount of scholarly resources that I will definitely be using for my future college assignments. Additionally, he explained how to prepare data and present it throughout our entire report. We had to include all the citations at the end of each assignment. Professor Bubrow then explained how to cite resources in APA format. This lab report assignment taught me how to create data charts, use an appendix, cite my resources in APA format, and use information literacy from an online database for research.

The interview report assignment was the most time-consuming assignment of the entire course. It consisted of conducting an interview with a professional engineer of my designated major. At first, we use e-mail as a source of communication to reach out to any engineers interested in conducting an interview. The interview required asking several questions in regards to the individual’s education and career. The report consisted of thoroughly discussing the interviewee’s responses and the advice they gave to us. I had the great opportunity to interview Saha Salim, a Nuclear Engineer for the US Navy. Saha attended NYU and graduated with an Engineering degree. This assignment taught me how to professionally reach out to individuals and conduct professional interviews. With this assignment I was able to improve my communication skills, and networking skills. This assignment also helped me realize that the more colleagues I have, the more opportunities I can have.

The proposal project was an assignment that involved working with a group of people. The purpose of this assignment was to create a proposal to make a change on The City College of New York campus. My group members and I decided to create a proposal on making a change to the North Academic Center Cohen Library. Our proposal was to relocate the library shelves to open up more space that can be designated towards students to use for studying. We began to evaluate the procedures and expenses that would go into an action plan. This assignment has taught me several things that I will be applying in any future group assignments. To begin with, it taught me how to collaborate with others and successfully finish an assignment. It has improved my communication and teamwork skills. Also, it has taught me how to manage individuals and ensure that they meet their deadlines for a task. The use of technology has helped my group members and I tremendously. We were able to successfully create a proposal through the use of the online database, the internet to gather our resources, and Google Drive to collaboratively work on the report.

The technical description was the last assignment of the course. This assignment involved picking an object involving their major and writing a description of it. I chose a firewall as my topic as it pertains to my major of computer science. In this assignment, I thoroughly explained what a firewall is, what it does, and the different types of firewalls. This assignment involved the use of technology for research and citations of any resources we used. The purpose of this assignment was to inform the audience about firewalls. This assignment has taught how to conduct research on a topic while using a synthesis of all my gatherings to present it in an appealing format for the audience.

Throughout the entirety of this course, Professor Bubrow has taught us, students, much more than just the assigned projects. He has taught us how to use commas, colons, and semi-colons in our writing. Also, he has taught us how to improve grammatical errors, which would help improve my writing assignments. He has provided us with many practice problems to identify any grammatical errors and fix them. The most significant thing I learned from Professor Bubrow was how to use information literacy from scholarly resources. Through learning this, I can always rely on the database for any future resources I need.

In conclusion, Professor Bubrow has taught me many different skills in Writing for Engineering. From the resume, lab report, interview report, group proposal to the technical description, I have learned many new things that will have a huge impact on me. Learning the use of audience and purpose,  information literacy, grammatical errors, and citations have helped me tremendously in this course and will continue to help me further in my life. I will apply the skills I have learned in this class to the remaining portion of my education here at CCNY and to my future career. It has been a great opportunity to be a part of Professor Adam Bubrow’s classroom and acquiring new skills and knowledge in the spring semester.