English is so important in the world of engineering, prior to this class I thought engineers only need to be savvy in math and science, but I was totally wrong.

            This semester of English has been greatly beneficial to me and has set an important background for my future career. The person I was three months ago would never have understood how crucial the key themes and assignments of this class would be, but the good thing is that I get it now. Engineering is a collaborative effort with your team, and you need to be able to communicate with your team in an efficient and coherent manner it is not only about how good you are in math. In addition, employers are not only looking for the smartest person to hire, you can be as smart as you want but if you do not have communication skills you will probably not be hired. These are the key things I am taking with me from this semester and I know it will be an immense help in the future.

            Writing comes in many genres – this is one of the first things we learned this semester and it is important. This semester made me realize that to make it up the ladder in our career we need to be able to understand each genre of writing. When talking to your boss you want to be as formal and respectful as possible, with your coworkers you should be formal as well, but you can ease it down a little. It is important to get genres down to a T and I can proudly say I feel I succeeded in that remark. You can say the technical description is almost like a pamphlet for the product we chose, I mean after all it has a table of contents and pictures describing the innovation we chose to write about.

            I also caught myself revising my work more than I ever have. I think this may be to the fact that I was used to being lazy with my writing, but you made it hard for me to be lazy. In the past, my teachers would tell me that my rough drafts do not need to be the full length of the actual assignment, but you always said we need to do the rough draft fully. I was originally so annoyed with this because I was lazy but slowly, I realized that when I was writing my final draft, I was happier with it because I have revised and edited my work more than I ever have. When I am an engineer it will be important that the work I produce is as perfect as possible, so I am elated that I lost my laziness and I revise my work now.

            This semester also helped me improve my writing overall because I learned how to take a stance in my writing and stick to it. In the past it would be easy for me to keep talking and talking and lose sight of what I was supposed to be talking about in the first place. I now understand how inefficient that is and how you need to take a stance in your writing. Like I mentioned before in the world of engineering you want to be able to share your ideas efficiently and coherently so that you do not confuse your coworkers and disrupt productivity. I think I have got much better at sticking to my stance and going back to it like when I keep mentioning how the skills I learned relate to the world of engineering. My skills were put to the test in the group engineering innovation where usually I would be shy leading me to not communicate effectively but this time around, I was way better than what I used to be. I would say that I was an important person in my group to get the ideas rolling and get us on track to working at a pace that would give us enough time to finish the assignment and I am proud of myself. I came up with the idea for the innovation which got us working right away and I also divided the work amongst ourselves, so we all work equally which is the most efficient way.

To make a powerful stance you would want to back it up by trusted sources and that is something I got better at as well. I would usually get sources from the front page of Google but like you mentioned there are millions of results to choose from so how would I know which source is good? I now use the CUNY library for my sources because it narrows down the search a ton and only shows trusted sources that would be beneficial to my writing. Our lab report analysis was what helped me learn how to find sources and use them effectively and although I found that assignment annoying in the beginning, I realized how important it was after.

This semester has been extremely useful and successful. The skills I picked up and honed will be beneficial in setting me apart in my career. It will hopefully the backbone of my engineering career where I can use my English skills and STEM skills to be the best engineer I can be.