For unit three, I made the first draft of my formal report which included conducting interviews, sending a survey, conducting research and actually writing the draft. I also peer reviewed Jenny’s draft of her formal report and got feedback from Jenny on my report.
I found that writing the draft of my formal report was easier than I thought. I think that this was because I had already done some background research on the Science Undergraduate Society for unit two and had already created an outline for my report. Though I had previously never written a report, I have written scientific papers of similar length. The papers that I normally write heavily depend on what I find in literature, so I do not normally create an outline or plan out my work much beforehand. As I start researching, I typically also start writing so this was a new experience for me. Creating an outline and proposal really helped me to think about the design and purpose of my report before writing it, thus making is much easier to write when I actually began writing.
Conducting research for my report was surprisingly smooth since a large part of my information came from the AMS Election website. The data was already organized by organization and year, which made it really easy for me to use and visualize. I also created a survey which I sent to science students. I used Google Forms to make my survey and this made it really easy to use and distribute. I simply copied the link to my survey to online forums for science students and google compiled my results and created graphs for me to use in my report. Overall my survey came back with some interesting feedback and was really helpful in my report. My research also included conducting interviews with members of the Science Undergraduate Society. I was initially intimidated to approach members of the organization, though I found that they were all excited to talk about the organization and suggest ways to improve. The interviews gave me a much better idea of what the organization is currently doing to improve participation rates, and to see where I can make suggestions.
Organizing the report was smooth since the information seemed to logically flow together. First, I would give background information on the organization and then I would talk about the information I collected, and then propose ways to improve. The outline from unit two was really key in preparing this general flow of the report, though the smaller sub-sections and titles were made as I was writing the report according to what made the most sense at the time.
After writing my own report, I then peer reviewed Jenny’s formal report. As I stated in my last reflection on unit two, the peer review process is really helpful to understand what is going through the readers head when they read my report. It was also interesting to see how different students approached the same assignment. I seemed to focus more on the data and what that meant, where Jenny seemed to focus more on the implications of what change might do. I do not think that there is only one right way to write the formal report and reading Jenny’s draft was really helpful to see where I could put more attention in my own report. It was also interesting to see where Jenny and I’s reports were similar. We both used Google Forms to create an anonymous survey to create visuals for our reports. I was glad to see another student using Google Forms as it is a really great tool for collecting data.
Overall, I am happy with the progress that I have made on the formal report, and the feedback that I got from Jenny on it. This unit has taught me a lot about writing with “You-Attitude” and to keep the reader in mind when writing. I look forward to the last unit of the course.
Formal Report Draft: 301 Jobina Tamminga Formal Report Draft