I found this unit to be the most relevant to life after graduation. I took this class with the hopes of improving communications in a business setting. Although I am sociology major, I hope to go into Public Relations. The reality is that some business training is necessary, and difficult to get within the arts faculty. Unit three introduced some really interesting assignments that were highly relevant to the real world.

I found learning about the YOU attitude to be a valuable school. When I first read the assignment, I thought that I already knew how to do this and perhaps was a little too confident. For this assignment I actually took a significant amount of time and read my classmates submissions as well.   Looking at what others wrote was just as valuable to me as writing it myself. For that assignment specifically I will be really interested to see how I do because it is an important skill to have and one that I know will be critical to my success in PR. With that in mind, although I went in quite confident, I did struggle with removing “I” and “you”. I had no idea it would be so difficult to remove myself from the critique.

The most significant challenge I have faced in this course is creating the rough draft for my formal report. Not only did I underestimate how long it would take, I had a difficult time really narrowing down what the focus of my report would be. It turns out the most effective way for me to do this was to do multiple drafts. I also underestimated how much space describing my idea would take. What I mean by this is explaining the inner workings of the sorority, Kappa Kash and various other terms. When I thought of the idea, I forgot that Greek life is not something that is popular within Canada and requires a thorough description. In the end I handed in a report that was not complete. However, the missing parts of the assignment are mostly data. I find that when I do an assignment like this one, I miss large portions or misinterpret the instructions. I tried to do the parts I was most likely to do wrong, that way I could get feedback on my weakest parts of the report.

I always find peer reviews to be difficult. While I no longer get nervous to hand them in, I find it hard to be really critical of my classmate. I do find that reading others work is a really large help to me. This may not be the learning goal professor Paterson had in mind that is my biggest take away. Seeing how others interpreted the assignment, or technique chosen really improve my understanding of the task as a whole, even if it is too late to improve my mark. I really see this class as something that is about more than a grade; it is shaping my professional voice. I really don’t think I fully grasped that until this unit. I feel throughout the unit, my largest strength was my language. My tone is always professional, I never use slang and I try to use language that is as formal as possible.