Monthly Archives: December 2019

Strengths and Weaknesses

Overall ENGL 301 has been a fun but challenging course due to the unorthodox structure of the course. Unlike all the other courses or online courses I have taken, ENGL 301 has no lectures or video lectures and instead all of the information can be found through the weekly readings from the textbook as well as from the instructor blog. While this style was quite different I found it extremely effective as I was able to read through the textbook and learn all the material at my own despite the fact that there was no lectures. The textbook also did a very good job at explaining the technical skills through providing multiple examples per section.

One of the things I struggled most with during the course in regards to the assignments for the class was the overall structure of my writings. Formal pieces of writing such as professional emails, references, and etc all have extremely strict structures that must be followed closely. At the start of the course I would often make mistakes in regards to the structure of specific documents, especially with avoiding white spaces.

A second thing that I consistently struggled with was the overall tone in my writings. As a person who has never really written any formal documents before, it was difficult to always maintain a professional yet friendly tone during all of the written assignments.

FUTURE CAREER GOALS

Learning to write formal documents whether it is an email to a potential employer,  a resume, or a cover letter are all fundamental skills a person must learn when they start looking for their first job. I thought this course did a great job in allowing us to practice practical skills that we will definitely use during our job search.

A second skill that I thought that this course taught me that will really help me when I pursue my first full time job is time management. Unlike a lot of other courses this course really requires you to have the self commitment to stick to a schedule or else you will start to really fall behind.

The third skill that I thought this class taught extremely well was working in a group environment. From almost the beginning of class we were assigned to specific writing teams and we often times have to lean on the advice of our team members in order to improve our writing skills. It was also super nice to have people to reach out to when we were stuck on a certain assignment.

Creating a web-folio has been a challenging yet rewarding process as the creation of a web-folio really requires a lot of creativity and artistic skills which are all skills that I usually struggle with.

One of the most crucial aspects of designing a web-folio is the visual portion of the web-folio. This then includes things like font-size, font-style, overall page layout, images, headers, and etc. Personally for me I choose with the most simplistic design of using the the font size and colour scheme provided by WordPress. The only thing that I really changed from the default design of WordPress is the background colour which I choose a forest green like colour to fit the nature scheme of my web-folio.

In terms of navigation, a tool bar is placed at the top of the website which makes it easy for anyone to navigate the website. Also all the links to the different sections of the web-folio is also provided at the home page.

Overall the creation process of the web-folio was an extremely rewarding experience as it allowed me to use a lot of the technical skills I gained throughout this course. The web-folio also allowed me to review a lot of my old posts which I had worked on in the past. Hopefully in the future I will have more opportunities to create more web-folios like this.

As a person who has never written a formal report this assignment was both exciting and challenging as it was a lot of fun to work on a report that had real life implications but there were definitely a lot of things I had to learn while writing the report. One thing that I believe massively benefited me was that I picked a topic and organization that I was extremely familiar with which made the researching portion of this assignment quite easy as I was given access to a lot of the data I needed from my previous co-workers. With that being said though the survey portion of data collecting was quite difficult to pull off as many parents of the participants were rather skeptic of the survey and it took some convincing before a lot of parents agreed to complete the survey.

A second challenge that I realized extremely quickly is that there is a budget to every single program a company runs. The Richmond Aquatics special needs program was no different and the fact that this was a non-profit program meant that the budget for this program was even smaller than the majority of the other programs that Richmond Aquatics ran. This then really limited a lot of the solutions we originally had on solving the staffing shortage issue of the program as additional funding was simply not possible for a non-profit program like this one.

The peer review process was definitely an interesting one as I myself have actually attended nwHacks which is the organization that Jason decided to conduct his formal report on. The problem that he is addressing in this report in regards to student engagement is a real one and I can tell you first hand that a lot of students whether its because of lack of guidance or motivation do not complete a project. I like Jason also agree that further incentives to the program such as free swag or possible interview from the company could help the program exponentially as better engaged students will lead to better quality projects that are produced at nwHacks which means the overall prestige of the event will also increase.

Link to formal draft Formal report draft