My Way Into the Future: A Retrospective Essay on Writing for engineers

When I first enrolled in the Writing for Engineering course, I saw it as just another requirement on my path to becoming an engineer. However, as the weeks unfolded, I realized that this course offered something far more significant than I anticipated, and it was no normal English class like the ones I’ve had before. It provided me with the tools to express technical ideas clearly and provide me with professional skills that are essential for any professional. Through practical assignments, presentations to our classmates, and exposure to various forms of technical writing, I have developed a deeper understanding of how to craft professional papers that meet industry standards. This essay reflects on my growth in the class and how each and every assignment has helped me to become a better writer.

For our first assignment, we got the task of writing our own resume tailored specifically for a job in our major, this proved to be a challenging task, as it required us to research the company we wanted to partake in, properly asset our individual skills, and synthesize this information to present ourselves as valuable candidates for the organization of our choosing. This process encouraged me to re-evaluate myself and think of ways to present myself on a manner to interest potential employers through the cover letter that accompanied my resume. The writing of the cover letter also proved to be challenging, as it required the same amount of thinking, or more, than the resume itself, since this cover letter would be the first impression of me to the employer, thus requiring me to communicate in an efficient manner, making this assignment a valuable exercise in professional self-representation.

In our second assignment, the task was to create a lab report about an experiment involving the probability of the rolling of two dice. This required us to assemble a paper utilizing technologies like excel; to visualize the results of the simulations, and python coding; to acquire said results in the means of a simulation of dice rolling. This report was targeted at a scholarly audience, which meant that this paper required us to utilize technical wording through the report, where our main purpose was to explain the experiment, its results, compared to previous experiment of a similar nature found in the CCNY Library, synthesizing it in a way that other scholars would understand clearly while utilizing precise wording. Through this assignment, I gained valuable understanding in scientific writing and learned how to communicate complex ideas to an academic audience.

The third assignment is the one I found the toughest of them all, the task was to answer an RFP that consisted in the remodeling of the student center at CCNY, where the intended audience, was the board of executives at CCNY. This was a group project where each of the students was tasked with different sections of the proposal. My section was the floorplan of the building, in this section I had to utilize the software AutoCad to make a layout for the building, later this layout had to be translated into a written explanation of each floor and its components ensuring clarity for the audience. As I said before on this assignment I had to collaborate with teammates. Together we synthesized the architectural, budgetary, and logistical detail into a comprehensive proposal and presentation with the purpose of interesting our classmates in our proposal. This assignment taught me the importance of precise writing, teamwork, and tailoring to an audience for future presentations out there in the world.

For our last assignment, the task was to make a technical description on a topic of our choosing and develop a presentation rooted from our research. This assignment allowed me to delve deeply into a subject I found interesting, which was anti-seismic architecture, requiring me to break down the concepts surrounding this topic, these being : base isolation, and energy dissipation systems, and explaining them in a manner that would be interesting and comprehensible to my audience. Creating the written portions presented a challenge since I had to synthesize the technical information found through my research in a clear and precise way and engage listeners with visual representation of the concepts. This assignment was helpful since I had the opportunity of breaking down complex topics into comprehensive media for my audience and also through the comments left by each classmate after each presentation, giving me and idea of how to communicate my ideas better out there in the real world.

This practical assignment where not the only type of teaching in the class, in our classes we also learned basic writing skills, such as: the use of the comma, the user of the semi colon and colon, and the use of precise wording. These lessons served as a foundation to refine my writing, ensuring that the writing in my assignment was not only accurate by using reliable sources, like the ones found in the CCNY Library, but also stay clear and professional. Improving these fundaments has shown great improvement to my ability to communicate complex topics efficiently, both in academic settings, and towards my future professional writings.

To conclude, Writing for Engineering has been both a challenging and transformative cause, this being because each assignment, from writing a tailored resume to collaborating on a proposal, has pushed me to synthesize knowledge from various sources with effective communication. The practical assignments combined with the teaching of the writing fundamentals have given me the tools to express myself more clearly and professionally. As I move forward in my education, I’m confident that what I’ve learned in this course will remain vividly in my future papers and allow me to connect to my audience in a deeper level, and present myself as a competent and articulate presenter, thus giving me leeway to my way to the future.