As a student finishing my degree, I am well aware that I am prone to procrastination. So, I found the structure and assignments for unit three to be very useful. Having to create an outline and draft of my formal report to meet strict due dates was a helpful way to ensure I did not leave too much work on this project for the end of the semester. My goals for unit three were to create a report draft that was comprehensive and interesting, and to work the draft into a near final copy of the report. I also wanted to work on providing peer review feedback that would help my partner achieve the same goal; a close to final copy of their report.
I found assignment 3.1 to be a nice break from focusing solely on the formal report. I also found that writing with “you-attitude” was great way to practice writing friendly, professional and courteous letters. At first I had a bit of trouble with understanding what writing with “you-attitude” meant, but the Reader Centered Writing article, as well as the peer feedback helped my understanding a lot.
As mentioned above, I am really happy assignment 3.2 was due so early. It gave me the incentive I needed to get to work on my report, and create a comprehensive working draft. The time spent researching and collecting data was a very interesting experience. I did not have a concrete hypothesis for what I was expecting to find, but I did have a feeling that the uncontrolled intersection would have more instances of collisions or near-collisions. I did not know what to expect at all, and was a little worried that my data would not be useful or that I would not have any data at all. However, the data I collected turned out to be very useful to support the ideas in my report. When beginning to write, I found the examples in the textbook to be very helpful with how to layout and organization my content. Once I had all my data analyzed, had a layout for my sections and knew what information I needed, the 15 pages of writing seemed far less daunting.
The peer review for Assignment 3.3 was probably the most helpful peer review so far. Not necessarily in terms of feedback, because the feedback from all peer reviews has been immensely useful. But in term of process, I found this peer review really useful. Having an opportunity to view another report was very valuable; my partner for the peer review had incorporated a wonderful abstract and table of contents with his report and I had completely overlooked theses supplements for front matter. After seeing them utilized so well, I was excited to incorporate these to my report as well.
In terms of feedback my peer reviewer was awesome! Having another set of eyes view and evaluate your work is always useful, but it just so happens that my partner is especially knowledgeable in mathematics and statistics. This knowledge allowed him to catch some pretty serious errors in the statistical claims of my report. The feedback he provided will help me correct those errors and make my report much more accurate, and therefore, much stronger. As I have mentioned in all my reflection blogs so far, I like the peer review process a lot, and find that it helps me meaningfully analyze and critique my own work.
Again, my writing teammates have been a great resource and have provided me with such valuable feedback that is consistently helping me improve my writing. Overall, I feel this was another successful unit complete; a unit which I really enjoyed, and found enormously useful.