Jayden Garcia

5/20/2025 

Throughout the semester in this course, I have learned many things about the importance of communication with the audience and overall writing in general. From writing about how napalm can be made from Legos to working in a group to make a proposal and project to make the boroughs of New York better, this course has taught me a lot about how to write at the level of an engineer. In this self-assessment paper, I will demonstrate that I have understood the concepts and terms that were presented in this course and how they will help me in the future as I grow and become better.  

As the course began and I was getting introduced to the basics of it, I figured this class would interfere too much with the other courses I had because it was online. Turns out, it did not collide with the other courses, which made the process of drafting my papers, doing discussions boards and doing final drafts way easier. For the course learning outcomes, three of them will be discussed and how I achieved those outcomes through the work I did with others and my own. One of them I consider the most important one is “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes”. For this learning outcome, I achieved this via the Engineering Proposal Project. In this Project, students would be grouped into groups of 3 and would need to think of an engineering problem they could solve. For our group, we thought of implementing rooftop gardens on half the buildings in all five boroughs of New York to solve the carbon emissions problem NY has. The roles varied for each person, and I was given the role to talk about the budget needed and how much everything needed for this project would cost. Our group would talk about each other’s parts in the project and try to help each other with finding sources and providing help when someone couldn’t submit their assigned paperwork. As for the presentation part of the proposal, we rehearsed our parts a little bit before recording the one that would be posted for other groups to see and comment on. During this, we would give suggestions to each other for what should be cut or included. The entire project helped me be able to work with other people and showed me how important communication between members is in the field of engineering. 

The second course learning outcome I learned in this semester was “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”. The paper I learned this outcome with was with my technical description. For this paper, we would choose a simple item and write about its function, purposes, what makes the item, etc. For this paper, I chose to do a flashlight because I thought that it was going to be simple and not much to talk about. I thought wrong, as I looked at many sources on the internet as to how a flashlight was made, how it works, the types of flashlights, and much more information. Throughout the paper, I would paraphrase some of the information that I obtained when it came to talking about the components of a flashlight, the explanation of how the inside works, and provided images of the parts and circuity of the item. Evaluating the sources was the difficult part because I had to determine each source on what they are talking about, how credible they are, and how I should include it in my paper. Additionally, connecting the sources to make them work in tandem so the audience could understand what was being talked about and to make the text a smooth and calm reading experience. Overall, this learning outcome was probably the hardest to do due to the length of the paper, the amount of research I had to do for it, and having to make sense to the reader so they would not get confused mid-way through reading it. I did enjoy writing this because we were able to talk about virtually anything that existed, as long as it fell under the topic of being simple enough to talk about and not too complex for the reader to read and not too complex for the writer to go off in a tangent accidently.  

As for the last course learning outcome, it would have to be “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects”. This last course outcome can apply to any of the work I did for this course. This is because for any of the work I did for this course, I had to spend some amount of time to actually look up sources to begin talking about what I want to talk about in my papers. Sometimes, I would compare sources with each other to see which provided information that was more credible and provided more overall information that can be included in the paper I was trying to write. A good example of this is the technical description. Having to go through multiple sources to search for how each component works, the materials used for the construction of the flashlight, and how each component worked with each other to produce the light that was being emitted through the lens of the flashlight was very time consuming but it worth it in the end.  

This course has really taught me a lot about everything that was needed to become a competent communicator in the engineering field that I would recommend this course to those who want to pursue any type of engineering field. It can improve what you never thought needed to be improved and can get ideas and proposals to many people easier and understandable. I really enjoyed taking this course this semester and I hope that my writing will continue to get better as I get closer to becoming what I want to be in the future.