For unit two, I made a LinkedIn profile and worked on my formal report. This included making a proposal, outline and a progress report for the formal report.
I found the process of making a LinkedIn profile for this course quite surprising. Prior to this course, I had a LinkedIn profile that I was quite happy with. I had received multiple job offers through my profile and had spent a lot of time previously editing it. What surprised me was that the LinkedIn best practices assignment was actually very helpful in recognizing where my own profile could be better. For example, I previously had all of my work experience on my profile including waitressing jobs since I thought that any experience was good experience. I learned that including irrelevant details on my profile made it look disorganized, so I removed all of the unnecessary work experience. This trend was also true for the summary section since I had a lot of unnecessary details in the summary section. I also learned that asking coworkers for recommendations can be very helpful. I had never previously thought to ask coworkers for recommendations since I felt like my profile was good enough.
The peer review from Tom gave me additional feedback on my LinkedIn profile. He pointed out a few grammatical mistakes and also commented on how my writing could be a bit more precise. This comment on my writing has been brought up to me a few times in this course and is something that I am continuously working on.
I like the idea of a professional social media network because it allows you to keep up to date on organizations you are interested in or see what is new in a particular field without being distracted by friends and family. It also allows you to put a professional online image forward to coworkers and potential employers, but still allows you to engage with people that you know.
The formal report proposal was more difficult than I originally thought because it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do my report on. Choosing a topic that I thought would have enough content for me to write a report on was not easy for me. I eventually chose to write my report on participation rates for the Science Undergraduate Society at UBC because it is an organization that I have had experience with in the past and has a lot of online primary data. The peer review from Amy of my proposal was very helpful as she highlighted sections that she thought were well done and pointed out areas for me to improve such as adding more examples to my recommendations and creating an anonymous survey.
The peer review process was also helpful in looking at my own writing from someone else’s perspective. Reading and commenting on Amy’s proposal showed me what stood out to a reader and how much detail is necessary. It was really interesting to read the other proposals on my team forum and see what others were doing their projects on. This project highlights the diversity of the interests and hobbies of my group members, which is really cool to see.
I feel as though I have made good progress on my so far, especially after completing the outline since this is when everything felt like it really came together. Deciding on how many sections to have, and what would go in each section made the project feel much more organized. The outline was a great steppingstone to completing the progress report since I had already laid out exactly what I would need and how I would complete each step of the report. My final recommendations will depend on the results of my survey and interviews, though I feel confident in the research and information about participation rates that I have collected already.
Revised Report Proposal: 301 Jobina Tamminga Formal Report Proposal
Peer Review: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2019wa/2019/10/16/2-1-peer-review-of-formal-report-proposal-2/