This is the last day of class, and I feel confident that I have learned many things during this semester. However, I am a little indifferent as to how fast time passes by. To think that I was completely someone different four months ago to now. I still have many things to work on, studying for the finals, and finishing my work for this class. I am really thankful for all the lessons I was taught during this semester and plan to learn more as I go through my college years.

This week we are closing toward the end of the semester and doing our final work. Somethings I feel like I learned during this year, specifically in this class is how to revise and draft. Previously, I would not draft my work but rather just simply write. The value of drafting and revising has certainly increased my creativity and flow of thoughts because as I am rereading my work, I see where I can improve or what I can add. Some things I feel like I struggled with this year is was with time management and keeping up with my studies. However, due to this, I feel like I have become more structured as I am more comfortable setting up a time to study.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I this time of the year to reflect on my life and how things have changed. This year was undoubtably the craziest year, I’ve experienced in my life and it made me more humble. The corona virus has made me thankful that I am young and healthy. Many people won’t be able to celebrate this day with family and friends due to covid restriction, so I’d like to take the time to be able to appreciate that I am able to spend with with my parents and siblings. I experienced a drastic shift in my life from high school to college. College has certainly made me more studious and more educated oriented to do better and teach me valuable skills like time management, and taking good notes. This class has also made me a better writer and drafter, I learned how to write papers using researching, drafting, and revising skills. It taught me how to write a memo, which I never really understood was about until I wrote one. Even though, this year has been hard, I am grateful for all the things I have in life and cherish the lesson I learned from this hard time.

In my engineering proposal I proposed that we issue of pollution of ocean and the environment. NYC is the one of the most dense populated city in the world. Through that we produce a lot of plastic waste that are damaging our city. Some engineering ideas that I have is to make a machine that gives reward to costumers if they use reusable bags. This means that the bags have a tag that you scan when purchasing items and you get reward points. Once the customers saves enough points, they will be credited reward to their accounts, whether it be money or discounts. I feel this project will be fun and interesting because as the human population grows we need to protect our home for the prosperity of humanity. Somethings, i feel good on this week is brainstorming ideas for this project. Thinking about resolution about this issue expanded my thought process and allowed me to think about society and what will be more reasonable . Somethings that I need to improve on is researching and finding more sources similar to my proposal.

This week has been the most stressful out of all the weeks so far in college. I’ve had assignments piled up and it’s also election time, which can be nerve-wracking. This week was also the week I voted for the first time and finally feel like an adult. Due to all the election buzz, I found myself focusing on the news and watching live streams rather than doing my work. However, I did manage to do my work on time and also stay updated. Some growth, I need to make is to prioritize what’s important to me right now, and I feel that I should improve my time management and organize my work load.

In this class, this week we focused on how to right a lab report and all the necessary steps that go in making one. My topic for the lab was to evaluate how covid has impacted student’s mental heath. Somethings I feel I did good in was getting research on how different factors that might contribute to the results. Some growths, I need is to have better time management, but also for the lab I want to get more people to participate in my survey so I can have a better representation of the data.

Due to covid, it has become much harder to learn and retain information. For almost all my academic life, I’ve been in a learning environment where I was adapted to learning the best way. In-person learning is the only way that I’ve been taught to learn. Being a freshman in college and taking online classes have been difficult. What I’ve noticed is that it’s harder to pay attention because I’m not in a learning environment. Being home makes it easier to get distracted because it’s your comfort zone. Also, the pandemic has made the learning experience very lonely, as you don’t feel connected with others and have the motivation to strive.

From my personal experience, I chose to do my lab report on how covid impacted the lives of students. In this lab, I want to research how staying isolated from other students affects the student’s motivation and mental health. Some other factors, I want to learn about is how fairly each student is able to receive their education. For example, some students might lack a stable internet connection or some pay be living in a toxic environment where its hard to learn.

This week we worked on our memo draft and our final memo. The memo project was a good way to expand my knowledge of what a memo is. Growing up you would hear from teacher sand others about a memo. This project was also a good way to interact with others outside of class and socialize with others, since we can’t really do that due to covid.

Somethings, I felt I did good at while doing this project is learning and enforcing the the skill of revising and editing. As my role as a the submission manager, I looked over my teammates work and edited parts of the memo where I thought could have been better such fixing grammar and adding more context. Somethings I feel that I could have improved on is being more vocal about the topic or subject of the matter early in the project. For instance, after the first draft was done, I wanted to use a different source but since, we had already written the first draft and our sources aligned with the purpose of our memo, the team felt there was no need to change it.

Overall the project was fun and helped us understand the skills to write a paper, such as time management, research, drafting, and revising. Working in a group helped us split the work and help expand out communication skills.

Last week we had to hand in the technical description. From the peer review and the teachers review, I changed the format of my description. Previously, I wrote my work in a paragraph and provided no images. The final draft, I avoided, writing clumped up paragraphs and added pictures. Some things, I could have down better in the final draft is adding better captions to the pictures. Since, I was editing on google docs, adding descriptive captions messes up the format. Some things, I feel that I did well, is describing the components and adding complementary pictures.

This week, we are working as a group to write a memo. I chose to be the submission manager. We all had the same idea for the topics, NYC subway. I feel that I could have been more vocal on the specific topics we talked about.My teams wanted to focus on the signal issue, while I was thinking about the architectural structure of the subway station. Somethings, I feel we did well was that, we have a chart of whose responsible for what work and a date, it’s expected to be done.

This week we worked on choosing an object and write a technical description. As I was doing my first draft, I realized that my work was not going to be the best. Due to my poor time management, I left work for the last minute for multiple classes. I was rushing through my draft, and doing it to just finish. However, I did learn a valuable lesson, in that college is not the same as high school. There is a lot of self learning and studying. As a reflect over my peers technical description, I recognized were I can improve and what I did well on. I think that I did well on identifying my general outline. However, I feel that I can improve on breaking my topics down to smaller topics. For example, for components, I could have created different points for each component, rather than just clumping it up in one big paragraph. Next, I should have added pictures to complement the components.

After reading the professor reflection of my work, I looked over my description and tried to see where I can do better. One point that he made was that my purpose was unclear and after I reread my description, I realized that I was too vague on the purpose. When I redo my work, I now know where I need to change and keep for a better technical description.

This week we discussed various topics that are vital for engineers to have in a professional workplace, such as communication and ethics. While reading through the textbook, It was eye-opening to see how complex these topics are. For example, communicating in a workplace is very important for success in that workplace. During the discussion was surprised that many people picked the ability to research an important characteristic. Personally, the only one the made sense is the ability to speak and write properly. Even though research is a key tool to have, the ability to communicate is to be able to project your mind to others. What good is having valuable research, if you can’t clearly express it to others?.

After reading about ethics, I realized how much unethical practices take place in real life and on the internet. Companies will do anything to get a sale or click, even if it means misleading the audience. Especially, news articles, because most of the time they put an outrages title that you have to click it, just to find out that it has nothing to do with the article. News outlets will sacrifice their reputation just for some clicks on the internet. Even more, outrages are that articles these days take things out of context and promote false narratives.