Unit Two Reflection
This module consists of two independent parts. One is to create a LinkedIn profile where we were not only asked to create our own digital resume, but also to review each other’s work. Finally, we did some secondary research online and summarized the best practice for professional networking on LinkedIn. Second part is related to the formal report as we started with proposing on the topic we chose to work on. After some preliminary research, we wrote a progress report that contains a rough timeline of how we plan to proceed with our research.
About preparing my LinkedIn profile
For this assignment, I created my first online resume with LinkedIn, a famous platform for building personal brand in job market. Having heard of it for quite a long time, I hadn’t taken actions to transit my resume onto it before this assignment. As a computer science student, I thought that potential recruiters would be more interested in my technical related work on github (which is a version control tool for developers to collaborate on software projects). However after spending some time browsing through LinkedIn, I noticed that many people of my major including my classmates have been active users of it. On reflection, I realized that even for those technical focused positions, recruiters would like their candidates to be well rounded persons. Sometimes, they pay equal attention to soft skills like teamwork and effective communication, especially for entry level positions. LinkedIn not only provides a nice user interface for resume creation; it also suggests on layout of your page with different sections for volunteer experience, language skills etc. All these online supports make one’s resume look professional at first sight and easy to maintain, not to mention that one can filter and set up connections with people of similar background which will be easily achieved with a paper resume.
About LinkedIn peer review
Overall I believe it’s a rewarding process. I got a chance to know more about my teammates and many others in this course beyond their blog biographies. While reviewing other’s work and searching online for LinkedIn best practices, I actually learned new ways of thinking or explored new features for myself. For instance, I learned from an online forum that users can also embed media like slides or video into the body of their experience and that inappropriate endorsement can be removed. By recommending these tips to each other, we all maximize the benefits we can gain from LinkedIn.
About preparing the proposal
Personally I don’t have much experience writing formal reports so this could a learning opportunity for me. Unlike other writing assignment where the scopes of problem to be researched are listed in the instructions, we were given the liberty to choose a topic that interests us and that we can recommend actions on the problem. The process of identifying such a problem certainly challenged me as my interactions with local communities and organizations are mostly limited in campus. Accordingly, I chose a language learning program aims at helping international students adapt to English speaking environment, one of the challenges I have been facing ever since. Considering a draft report needs to be completed in a relatively short time frame, one concern I have is whether I would be able to collect enough samples of data for analysis. The required length of this report may sound usual for many, but it’s actually the longest writing assignment I am going to have. As a slow writer, I will need to plan early and pay attention to the layout and organization of the report. Samples from the textbook may serve as a good reference.
Peer Review for report proposal
My partner kindly left many positive comments about my proposal. Meanwhile she pointed out that it would be better to explain what AES stands for. Indeed, this is a usual mistake while addressing something familiar to myself, I forgot to provide its full name at the beginning even if readers may guess its meaning by the end. The other thing she noticed is I mentioned “lack of feedback” as one of the key points in the statement of problem, but did not elaborate on it. She suggested having “an explanation of the type of feedback system”. Since it’s already beyond stating a problem, I decided to start a new paragraph in the proposed solution section to add more thoughts about the type of feedback.
formal report proposal-Xiaoying Cai – revised