In Unit Two, we explored two major parts of the course: the report and our LinkedIn profile. In terms of the report, I believe it will be an excellent exercise in technical writing, surveying, interviewing, and data compiling. We completed the proposal, outline, and timeline of our report for this unit. For our LinkedIn profiles, we compiled tips and learned the importance of ensuring that your profile is as appealing as possible to potential future employers. We then put these tips to work by improving our profiles, including making sure all sections were filled out and up-to-date, and ensuring our online presence is active, relevant, and professional.
Personally, Unit Two proved to be more challenging than Unit One. One reason for that is that I found the formal report proposal to be especially challenging. I have strong opinions on the state of healthcare and hospital food in Canada, but I wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted to proceed. I decided to tackle how we can improve the health of hospital food in Canada in a cost effective way. Thanks to my peer Sydney, who reviewed my proposal, I was able to realize that certain language (i.e “carcinogenic”) was not friendly to certain users, so I should more clearly define who my readership will be before using technical language. Further, I should define if this new meal plan would be for all patients, or just for the most vulnerable patients. With the advice from Sydney, I will be able to make my formal report more clear and realistic.
Prior to the LinkedIn assignment, I had already created a LinkedIn a few years ago. I occasionally got contacted by recruiters, but always had improving my profile far down my “to-do list”. This assignment gave me the “push” I needed to finally make my profile more complete. With my reviewer’s help, and advice from my team’s best practices blog posts, I cut a lot of unnecessary filler from the page, rendering it more concise and readable. Thanks to the tips I researched, as well as with the comments from my peer, I now understand the importance of a LinkedIn profile and will be working to maintain the better standard that my page now has because of the peer review process.
Overall, I believe that peer review was a valuable experience for improving my writing and I look forward to the learning objectives in Unit 3. My personal peer review process was challenging but less difficult than the previous unit. While my partner for the LinkedIn page review had excellent content, her page was lacking involvement as it had a lack of endorsements and connections. I made recommendations to her to try to be more involved in LinkedIn by “following” companies and charities that she’s interested in, as well as “liking” articles to show that she is active on the website. The review process for the formal report proposal also went smoothly. I was able to make suggestions to my partner to increase conciseness, as certain information was repeated throughout the report. Again, I was able to make these suggestions in a positive and constructive manner as specified in the textbook.
Below I have included links to Sydney’s peer review of my report proposal, and my revised report proposal.
My proposal: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-98a-2020sa/2020/06/19/formal-report-propsal-increasing-the-quality-of-hospital-food/
Sydney’s review: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-98a-2020sa/2020/06/24/peer-review-kathryn-simone-report-proposal/