Autumn Vancouver – My Fav

We started this unit by reviewing an extremely unprofessional email from an arrogant student to his professor about course registration. Although I do not think people like Evan Crisp exist in real life, it is a good lesson for us to learn the etiquette of writing professional emails. For me, I am really happy that I haven’t made any mistake like those in Evan’s email for years, and I think this email will always be a reminder about how ridiculous my emails are going to be if I didn’t follow those etiquette. This assignment is followed by writing a complaint letter and bad news letter as a customer and a customer representative respectively. I have to say since I did not have too much experience (and hopefully will never have), it really taught me the appropriate tone for addressing these kinds of issues. Overall, I think these two assignments are practical, and directly applicable to my life. 

Then we started preparing for the formal report draft. The actual research progress was a bit frustrating, as I have been struggling with my other courses. I spent too much time on collecting the survey result, so this caused some delay on my data section. The lesson here is to do better time management when starting a big project. Also, there is a lack of secondary sources to support my views, especially in how these student-held activities could help preparing CS candidates for jobs. This is also reflected in Yang’s review, as he mentioned my secondary sources are a bit weak. I think the mistake here is that searching supporting secondary sources should have been done in drafting the research proposal, and an alternative solution should be considered when there is not enough evidence to support my original solution. In terms of organizing the material, I found it to be relatively easy, as I was able to divide them based on my outline, and a lot of the material is reusable from my proposal and progress report.

The peer review process taught me a lot. Yang and I worked on similar topics, and by reading his report I was able to immediately tell the shortcomings in my report. The first thing I noticed was the detailed recommendation part, and there are more secondary sources to support his view. Although this is partly because his solution focuses more on workshops, while mine is about a variety of activities. In terms of organizing the report, mine was slightly better because of the use of headings and sub-headings, but this is an easy correction for him.

One more thing I learnt after reading Dr. Paterson’s feedback from previous assignments was the importance of writing with YOU attitude. I was not paying enough attention to the feedback, and as a result, my previous peer reviews were filled with “I” and “my”, which sound self-centred and unprofessional. The rewrite example given by Dr. Paterson was a lot nicer. Although there is no more peer review assignment left for this term, I will definitely keep this in mind for my future writings.

To sum up, I think Unit Three is probably the most interesting unit so far and I really learned a lot. 

Enclosure: Yifan Wang – Formal Report Draft Final