Vancouver in Summer

We started the unit by brainstorming the ideas for formal report and writing a proposal for it. I decided to use my background in Computer Science and address a problem that I found very relatable – the disconnection between CS education in university and skills demanded by jobs. However, my first draft was very vague. I proposed the solution of setting up an AMS funded student club, without even knowing how it actually works. The main reason for this mistake was that I did not have a target audience in mind before thinking about the solution, and figuring out the target audience means knowing who is going to be responsible for addressing the problem. After giving it more thoughts, I believe it would be more realistic to let CSSS handle this issue. As a result, the target audience for my formal report is the president of CSSS.  

The peer review process is really helpful, and I believe I have learnt a lot from reading Samantha’s proposal and her peer review of my proposal. I really like her idea of improving the onboarding process for new hires. As someone who also had a fully remote work experience, I think this problem is relatable, clearly-defined, and (potentially) has a feasible solution. Her proposal is also well-written, with the right amount of detail given at each section and plain wording that is easy to understand. Compared to her proposal, mine contains some grammatical mistakes, and some sentences are too complicated. The problem statement is too long, and should have been divided into paragraphs. In general, I should pay more attention to the correctness and conciseness, as they are really helpful in improving the clarity of writing. 

The other important part for Unit 2 is about LinkedIn. I have created my LinkedIn profile a while back and have been using it extensively for networking as well as applying for jobs, but I still learnt a lot during researching the best practices and read other people’s memorandum. For example, I never knew that the heading section will be used by LinkedIn’s algorithms when recommending your profile to other people, and having a complete profile increases your chance of being discovered by other people. Doing this research gives me chance to further polish my profile. Also, I gained some new perspectives on connecting with other professionals. Before doing my research, I often send empty connection request to other people, and it is really a bad practice. I should have stated my background and my intention to show my respect and sincerity. I believe that at the end of this course, I can be a better user of LinkedIn. 

Please find the link to my revised proposal and outline below. 

My revised proposal:  Yifan’s Formal Report Proposal

My outline: Yifan’s Formal Report Outline