My name is Kenneth Hahn and I am currently a student at City College of New York. The second semester of my first year in college is coming to a close and now I must reflect on my semester in the Writing for Engineers class. This class was like no other english class I have enrolled in. I was able to participate in group work that would help me work better with others in the future. In this class I was able to write relevant documents that I may encounter in the future of my career. As a Computer Science major, this class taught me efficient writing techniques that will help me in my future as a CS major.

 

In this class I had to write four major assignments: the memo, technical description, lab report, and the technical proposal. The memo was the first major assignment in the class, I had no idea what to write because it was my first college writing assignment. I was not able to get the grade I wanted on it, but I learned that a lot of research must go into these assignments.  In the technical description, I wrote about a mechanical mouse. The amount of research that went into this project was more than I anticipated. Professor Carr also explained how descriptive it needed to be. After finishing the steps, I did not believe that I could write that much about a computer mouse.  In the lab report, I discussed with the group I was assigned to think of a way to improve New York City. We chose to create a different communication system for the subway to create a faster and more efficient train system. The last assignment was the technical proposal, I was in the same group as the lab report and we decided to do our proposal on the California wildfires. The tricky thing about this assignment was the factors we had to consider when writing the proposal. We had to consider factors like the budget and the people we would hire because we needed things that would help grow our mission to help those in California. 

 

Throughout the semester, each assignment had a learning outcome that would help me write better. This class showed me what my writing lacked. The four major assignments enhanced my skill in reading, drafting, revising, and editing. The textbook and Professor Carr always helped in how to adjust my writing to the assignment genre at the moment. When I finish my first draft I would always try to edit and revise my assignment, which passively made me into a better writer. The audience analysis sheet helped in writing the outline for the assignments. The purpose of the paper would always depend on who the audience is that I would be writing for. In this class, I was able to not only grow as a writer, but it exposed me to group work. We would never do multiple assignments twice. The assignments would be in different formats such as memo’s, presentations, and hybrid class discussions. In hybrid classes we had to do genre analysis work that took a lot of research. Most of this research was done in databases and online libraries. 

 

I was able to enjoy this semester in this class because it was different compared to regular english classes. As a Computer Science major I enjoyed being able to write documents that I would later encounter in my career as a Computer Scientist. I was never an english person, but this class changed my perspective of writing and reading. Even through this Covid-19 pandemic, I want to thank Professor Carr for adjusting so much for her English 210 students and providing the necessary tools for us to improve our writing skills. 

Cordially,

Kenneth Hahn