Jinjie Liao

December 13, 2019

A path:

Writing for Engineering

I have been in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) conference at the City College. One of the engineers said, ”Most of the engineers are not good at writing and/or communicating.” He is one of them. But after he went to the workforce, he realized there is much work to write. He suggested, “Go to take as much English class as you can during college. It will help you a lot.” I thought this class, writing for engineering ENGL 21007, will focus on how to analyze the data or graphs as engineering does. However, this class is teaching us how to write. We have learned about email, interview reports, resumes and cover letters, lab reports, proposal writing, and a technical description. The writing assignments are helped us to write what is the writing that engineers should know how to write. 

On the second day of the class, we learned how to write an email. Do you know we need A and P to write an email? A and P stands for the audience and purpose. We should know who we are going to write to and know our purpose to write this email. First, we need to consider this person’s position. Is he/she is your boss? Your friend? Or your teacher? Then we can choose how to the starting of the email. Most of the time, I like to use “Good Morning and Good evening.” Because I do not need to type their names. If I typed the name wrong, then it will be awkward. For the first time to send the email to a person. It is better to use Dear, or use Dear Sir or Madam if you do not know their names. Then introduce yourself and tell your purpose. In the end, we can leave our contact information and do not forget to thank or regret them, with the signature. This helped me a lot in daily life because I always got emails from different people. Mostly, it is very important for an interview because we need to write a thank-you note to them for being there and have a great interview.

The interview report assignment is for students to find the same major engineer outside of the world. Ask on the street, meet somebody at the coffee place or family-related. This assignment taught us a few things. Firstly, is to know how to ask a personal interview question, not a job interview question. Secondly, we need to be active and be in contact with our future work field and be informed by other engineers. Lastly, we need to be socialized to get information about that engineer and need to communicate face to face. It was hard for me to find somebody outside the world is an engineer because I am shy and most of my family members are not highly educated. Thankfully, I had the contact of an environmental engineer, which is from his sister, who is the customer of my mother’s nail salon. I worked there in the summer sometimes. By chatting with the customers, I got one contact information about that person. However, I did not keep in contact with him until this fall semester, because I do not know what should I ask him, and I do not like bothering others very much. So, he did not respond to my email. I thought repeatedly about that email I sent to him later on. It might be because of my email sounds like I want to get a job interview, but not a personal information interview. Before I contact him again. I met my Earth Science Lab class Professor. He also is an environmental major. Then I asked him after the class, with a stammering, and English grammar errors, and strange wording tone and sentence. But he understood. I have recorded the interview. Instead of giving Mr. B an interview record, I used an auto audio transcription wed, called Temi, to make the sound into texts because my recording is very very bad. It is very hard for me to talk properly in sentences because my brain and mouth are not at the same pace. I always translate Chinese into English, that is why sometimes my language is weird. I am not used to talking in English because my friends are Chinese, it is not necessary to speak in English. I had many friends who speak English to me now, and my speaking skills are improving.

We also need a resume and cover letter for a job interview. Sometimes the cover letter is not required, but it is better to have one so you can talk more about yourself. I did a resume at LaGuardia Community College before this class. However, this assignment requires us to go online research a real job and follow that job requirement to create a new resume. There are fewer jobs for environmental engineering major students. I talk more days to research online than create a resume and writing a cover letter. I went to Indeed and LinkedIn. I found the one that I can mostly fit into. In this assignment, I reviewed how to do a resume and will have a better resume at the next time. This is the first time I did the cover letter. The professor at the LaGuardia told me the cover letter is separate from the resume, when I thought they should be together, in other words, I thought the cover letter is necessary for the resume. But I am wrong. The cover letter basically with a sort of self-introduction like an elevator pitch, a one-minute self-introduction. Then, it is the position that I want to get. Following that, I need to say why I can fit into that job, which means talk about my education, experienced job, the skills I can do and who I am, maybe with my interest in the work field.

The lab report is similar to the research essay I have done in high school. My high school does not have other regent exams, but the English regent. Instead, we have a 10th and 12th grader portfolio. In that portfolio, we have research papers for math or science. Similarly, we did this lab report. Only the difference is I am experimenting alone. Our topic is about dice. In this assignment, we need to quote from a data-based and peer-reviewed work. We learned how to quote other’s work in the class, and learned to be able to define which part of the sentence is the quote in a non-quoted sentence. I believe not only me, but everyone has faced finding a work that fits into your essay. I have read through many of the articles, and find none of them is the best fit. Therefore I just randomly picked one that kind of related to my work and quoted one sentence from them. The most important part is the work cites. Because sometimes we will have an article or a work that without an author’s name, published date and others. Then, we have no idea how to do the work cited. I usually search on Google to look up examples to help me fix that problem. Google has everything.

I think the most fun of the writing assignments we did is the proposed project. This is a group work project. So I got more new friends from the class. We take a few class times to discuss our project. At first, we need to come up with a fantastic name for the group. But I am not a good naming person, so I let other group members do it. Our name is Stud Bugs. I do not know what is it, so I searched up. In this project, it is hard for us to meet up privately so we always have discussions on the phone, and my phone continued ringing at midnight. That was a terrible experience because I was so tired and I need to sleep! However, everything went well at last. I liked the way we worked together and the final result of our new study hall at the Marshak yard, even though it is impossible to happen. The group presentation of the proposed project is very interesting, which helped me know about the school and there are so many things the college can be improved.

The last writing assignment we did is the technical description. This is important because in the future career, we might invent a conference and we need to introduce a new product. I have learned a lot from other student’s presentations and writings. I think I can improve my technical description writing skills such as the introduction paragraph. The introduction paragraph should have more descriptions of the purpose of the Makani kite. I have researched a lot about the Makani kite. The first time I have read about it is by researching “what helps the environment the most?” Then I got “Top 10…” something like this. Then I read the article and find out most of them just is a thought, but Makani kite has been worked on since 2006, which is about 13 years. But according to the Makani kite website, it said they have a 15-year experience of inventing the Makani kite. I think they took two years to planed out the designs and other kinds of stuff. This writing assignment helped us to get improved on researching, quoting and presentation skills. I am being involved in the class and I liked answering questions that I know.

From this course, I have learned and experienced a lot for my writing, communicating and presenting skills. The lecture always has new things to learn and keep me interested. The first class of this course has started. I thought we are not going to have grammar or spilling checking practices. But I was wrong again. We did a lot of practice during the last few lectures of the classes. I know that my English has many more spaces to be improved. Last but not least, thank you, Mr. B, that you and your course is very interesting and helpful.

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