Assignment 2.3 – Unit 2 Reflection Blog – Gary Tam
Unit 2 has been a very interesting unit. To write a topic that relates to my work without breaching confidentiality is incredibly challenging. I am delighted to nail down my research topic for this course finally. As my primary job duty as an Environmental Health Officer is to inspect food service establishments, I have found writing a report on a topic related to swimming pools refreshing. Another challenge I faced was about the level of details I should put in it. Even though the intended audience of the report is for the field Environmental Health Officers, the people who will read it are my peers and the instructor of this course. I felt encouraged after reading the peer review report written by Shervin. He did not find major issues in my proposal. He could understand the potential severity of the issue I identified. In addition, he concurred with my approach to remediate the issue. After I reviewed his peer review report, I made some minor revisions on my proposal. A revised proposal is attached at the end of this blog.
Another assignment was about creating a personal LinkedIn account to profile my biography. I have heard about this social media platform for many years. However, I did not have an interest to create one because I did not feel the importance of it. This assignment gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I did in the past years as an Environmental Health Officer, including the work I involved and the projects I completed. I realized that I completed many tasks in the past decade. After Jocelyn provided the peer review report, I was not surprised as I knew that my profile was a bit long. Some information might not be critical to be mentioned. Unlike a traditional 2-page resume, there are no general rules on how long a LinkedIn account should be. The profile design is subject to the discretion of the individual users. Even after I completed the summary on the best practices in LinkedIn, I still have not found a clear answer about the ideal length of the profile.
Ever since the instructor provided me feedback on my assignments, I have been putting a greater effort to review and critique my peers’ writing. This review process is beneficial to my writing because I can learn how to compliment others’ great work and offer my interpretation on their writing. I am grateful that my team members are courageous to provide their comments as well. In fact, it only makes sense if all team members put in their full effort to write the reviews in order to improve their writing skills.
On a brighter note, after received feedback from the instructor and my team members about my writing in Unit 1, I have paid more attention on the use of “-ing” and sentence structure. I am pleased to hear from my peers that I have made fewer grammatical errors. In addition, the messages I convey are clearer. With the strong start of conducting the research and writing the formal report, I am hopeful that my writing skill will be significantly improved by the end of the course.
301 Formal Report Proposed (Revised)
Shervin’s Peer Review on the Formal Report