Throughout the course writing for engineering I got a glimpse of how technical papers work. With no experience of writing engineering papers this helped me increase my knowledge about them. I had to familiarize my self with writing a resume, cover letter, memo, technical description and finally presenting an idea to a specific audience. From my previous semester I mainly focused on papers that consisted of analyzing journals and articles to further elaborate on a specific point. But, with engineering paper is was vastly different. We had to become comfortable writing papers that had nothing to do with analyzing idea but rather focus on formats and clear and precise language structure. This introduction to engineering will really help me in the long run with my major of computer science as it will mostly focus on these types of papers.
In the cover letter and resume, I had to establish my credibility as a college freshman and a working student to get a company to accept me for their internship program. In specific I applied to Ferguson Enterprise. I had basic ideas of a resume as I already had a job as a part-time employee which required me to make a resume, using that experience this assignment was not that difficult. I could easily get it done but when it came to the cover letter, I had to read through our online articles which we used in class to get a further understanding of what it is and how we develop a proper introduction to it. The cover letter is a paper that helps you get a spot in the company that you are applying for. It helps make a good first impression of yourself to the company. They read that and then decide if the resume is worth looking into which ultimately would end up in an interview. Keeping this in mind I made sure that my cover letter talks about all these points. My skills that I would bring to Ferguson Enterprise and a proper reasoning as to why I wanted to join them. These two papers were straight forward and would be useful in my career even after I graduate not just my major. I feel like I improved significantly in writing in a more formal way with these two papers.
Following the cover letter and resume we did memos. We started with a basic business memo analyzing and evaluating a code of conduct of a specific company. For that I once again focused on Ferguson Enterprise, their business code of conduct was straight forward and easy to understand. It also carried into the way the company runs their business. Ferguson Enterprise had it all in theirs but after carefully evaluating it, the code of conduct seemed to vague and needed more details. Unfortunately, I could not upload it on my portfolio since I lost the paper due and was unable to obtain another copy of it. Following that we did another memo that compared two lab report. In that memo we focused mainly on their format along with sentence structure and clarity of their papers. Analyzing their focus on their research and the data they used. If it was ethical or not. By comparing both papers, we also got a side by side representation of how different each lab report can be. Specifically, both my lab reports that were being compared had to do with establishing something new. One dealt with making a facility for compiler testing and the other focused on making a software engineering lab for college students so they can understand their subject better with physical hands on classes. Both memos helped us establish the basics of writing a memo. Since this was a new style of paper, the format and the basics of it seemed difficult but upon peer reviewing the papers and finalizing them into a solid paper, I got confident in writing these memos.
Afterwards, we did a technical description and instructions paper. This was another new concept but with the professor’s help it was not that difficult to do. He made us bring in several examples, got us into groups and made us analyze them to understand how this format of paper is written. Followed by a class discussion of which examples were good and which were confusing or needed more clarification. This class session had given us a strong idea of how to carry on with our own paper. I focused on a network device called the router. A router is a small box like structure that is connected via a power cable and a Ethernet cable that comes from your modem, the device that internet service providers setup at your home to give you access to the internet. We were asked to do a device that had something to do with our major. Since I wanted to focus on majoring in computer science specifically in the networking sector, I thought this was a great device to do my paper on. Professor Coppola also mentioned how throughout our college we would have to do many technical descriptions and that this paper was going to be significantly important. He made us do peer reviews using blackboard and the discussion tool which was a great way of compromising our in-class peer review sessions that we were unable to do due to the pandemic. This was extremely helpful in developing my paper further. Overall, this ended up being another new paper that I got confident in being able to do and I believe would help me in my major further.
Finally, our last project as a group was coming up with a proposal of an innovative well focused engineering solution to a problem. This was difficult due to the pandemic it was hard to reach my peers and communicate with them. After several attempts I had reached out to the professor and he ensured the others were receiving all information from me. This helped us get started and after discussing for a while on blackboard we decided on focusing on quantum computing. This was a device that would help solve tough algorithms that take the classical computers of today significantly more times, not only that the quantum computers can do even more by taking superpositions and entanglement into account. This meant that it could help with discoveries in several fields by considering other possibilities and look for similarities that might exist with current discoveries. Not only that it was going to be significantly faster and safer than classical computers. As a group we exchanged emails and did zoom calls to make sure we were all on the same page. Being the group leader, I had to also make sure everything was going accordingly and organized as well. After we finished the proposal we had to do a slide which was meant for a presentation that would have been carried in class but once again due to the pandemic we could only write the speaker notes which consisted what we would have said if we did the presentation. We had to do the slides that would cover a twenty minute presentation, so we decided on doing ten slides with two minutes each of speaking time and as there were five of us we each decided on doing two slides each. I believe this was a very effective way of ensuring everyone had the opportunity to show their skill in presentation and the knowledge about our proposal. Throughout the whole project we got to know each other and come up with a solid solution to the current problem of the computing world.
All in all, this course with Professor Coppola has been helpful in developing my writing skills related to engineering. Focusing on new types of paper has allowed me to increase my knowledge vastly. I believe having a strong foundation can lead to writing better papers in the future and through this course this was possible. Understanding formatting and how specific types of papers require specific materials and sources was essential into getting a good grade for this class. This class was required for me to develop as a strong computer science major writer and I am very satisfied with where I stand on writing paper for related to engineering majors.
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