While I was reviewing old posts I have made on my blog, I stumbled across the “ABOUT ENG 301” page where I wrote about expectations I had for this course. Towards the end of that page, I wrote about how nervous I was for making the decision to take this English course knowing that English has always been one of my weakest subjects in school. However, one thing that I sure of was the fact that practice makes perfect. After having complete the course, I can confirm that the initial statement is true.

Throughout the course, I had plenty of opportunities to practice technical writing, peer review others’ work, self-edit and revise my own work. These practices not only gave me the opportunity to gain insight from my peers’ work, but it also equip me with the skill sets needed to minimize my own mistakes each time I start a new assignments. I am so grateful to have taken this course knowing that I now have what it takes to write effective business letters and formal proposals. On top of that I also have the ability to present myself professionally through my LinkedIn page, resume, and cover letter.

My favourite component of this course will definitely have to be the formal report. From identifying an issue, to coming up with a resolution and writing a complete formal report to present my recommended solutions was such an exciting process for me. Although I must admit that gathering data and carrying out the actual study was a very long and difficult process, I did find it rewarding when I was finally able to interpret the data I have gathered and use it to come up with solutions for the formal report.

Overall, I believe that I have great improvement in my technical writing skills and I hope that I will be able to continue to utilize the knowledge I have gained from this course upon graduating from UBC.

After completing my Web Folio, I was surprised to find out how difficult this last portion of the assignment was. In fact, I would say it is one of the hardest assignments for me. I think this is due to the fact that I am not very familiar with web design so I had a lot of difficulty navigating through the different menus and figuring out how to add and remove menus to my current blog. However, I am glad that I had it figured out through trial and error.

My favourite part of this assignment was generating the page containing my best works. This is because I find it very rewarding to be able to put together pieces of work I have done over the entire semester. This also gave me a chance to reflect back and see how far I’ve come in terms of self-editing and technical writing.

Making an online resume was something that I have never done before. I have always only generated resumes through Microsoft word. It definitely wasn’t easy generating a resume online that was neatly spaced out and presented aesthetically. This may also be due to the fact that I am not advanced with html so I had difficulties when it comes to formatting. In the end, I was able to figure out the spacing and present my online resume neatly with the use of colour and different fonts. Overall, I am very proud of myself for this portion of the web folio.

This unit was one of the most difficult yet exciting unit for me in this course. The process of coming up with a research plan and gathering data was more time consuming than I thought. When planning my research, I was expecting to have a much larger size sample size, however I was only able to get 23 front line agents and only 5 managers to participate in the survey. Gathering responses from front line agents was a very slow process as a lot of them had different shifts or are on vacation. One feedback I had regarding my survey was the wording of the questions, some agents indicated that the wording was confusing and it is something that I can improve on in the future. For instance, one of the survey question that I had was “How many of your calls end with a customer threatening to file a CCTS complaint?”. Some front line agents were confused whether it is asking how many calls in general gets threaten to file CCTS complaints or how many called with complaints gets threaten to file CCTS. This is something that I will keep in mind next time when creating survey questions. I will need to be more specific with the wording of my questions.

Although the process of gathering data wasn’t my favourite part of the research, I did really enjoy the process of analyzing my data and writing the draft of my report. The results from the surveys were similar to what I had expected, which is great because I can use that data along with the CCTS annual reports to support my recommendations for changes in the call centre. I was able to use the survey responses from front line agents and compare it with the responses from managers to find the common problem and procedure gap in the Burnaby call centre. Originally, I had planned to only use the mid-year CCTS report, but I was able to find the 2018 annual report from CCTS as well, which was extremely useful because it gave me a list of top complaints filed by Telus customers.

As always, the I find the process of peer review very helpful. When I am writing the draft of my formal report, I get so nitpick about the little details of the report that I forget to look at the big picture and the overall layout. My partner was able to give me great feedback on the overall appearance of my formal report. Through previous peer review processes, I’ve picked up lot of tips regarding self editing and looking at my work through the reader’s lens so there was a lot more self editing done prior to the peer review process for this formal report.

First Draft of my Formal Report: 301 Lisa Liang Formal Report Draft