We’ve Come A Long Way.

Going into this course, I thought I knew a lot about writing and that I was a great writer given how many “Grade A” papers I’ve written throughout my time at UBC. I thought I was familiar and comfortable with professional writing given my experience in a corporate office. I can easily say now that I was wrong.

Right away, I knew I was going to experience a lot of growth over the summer while taking this course. Looking back, I remember my first assignment and how much Dr. Paterson had to say about my use of personal pronouns and being too “wordy”. I was forced to readjust my writing for the course immediately, already learning so much within the first week. Being in psychology and commerce, I am very used to writing documents with APA format, and switching back to MLA for this course was a wonderful refresher for me. Although it took a couple of tries to get my citation formatting correct, I eventually was able to succeed with the help of peer reviews.

This was a challenging course to keep up with. This was also my first online course taken for my degree which was a learning experience on its own. Balancing a full-time job and a family move on top of course work in a different time-zone, I was forced to time manage to an extreme level. With sometimes multiple assignments due each week, I learned to write smarter, faster, and more efficiently to ensure deadlines were met and timely completion; there wasn’t time for me to sit down and work on one assignment for hours. Time management is something I thought I excelled at this summer, never having a late assignment, and sometimes turning in assignments days before a deadline while still maintaining quality in my work.

At the beginning of this course, I stated the following on the home page of my student blog:

I do not look at this course as simply an academic credit or class, but as a professional development opportunity that touches on a variety of key topics within the practice of self-growth.

Having experienced this course in its entirety, I still stand by my statement. I have learned skills in this course that I will carry with me for the rest of my student and professional career. Going into a field that’s predominantly within a corporate environment, the documents I have learned to draft and the tone I’ve learned to write with will be beneficial in all of my professional settings. With the skills I’ve learned, I also feel that I will be able to combine them with the empathetic leadership qualities that I value and be the effective leader that I would like to be.

I would like to thank my writing team, The Scribes, for being so helpful and supportive throughout the summer. They were always available for questions, discussion, and support. Their peer reviews were a monumental factor in improving my writing. I have learned so much from each of them.

I would also like to thank Dr. Paterson for all of her support and availability in answering any questions or concerns I may have had. Thank you for teaching us all such valuable skills.

The Final Report had been completed, application packages were underway, and I had made it to the end. One of the largest assignments was upon me. The webfolio.

To be honest, the webfolio was tricky. I found it difficult to find examples online of other people’s webfolios, and I initially didn’t fully understand the difference between a LinkedIn profile and a webfolio. After doing a few readings and attempting to fully understand the given instructions, I started off slow and worked my way through step-by-step.

When it came time to create my page, it brought me back to thinking about our initial assignment in the course — creating our student blog. I needed to retrace my steps in formulating a webpage as this is a practice I do not carry out often. I opened the settings of my 301 student blog and I started creating my new webpage as a replica. I made the appropriate adjustments, such as changing the colour scheme, adding different menu items with the subsequent tabs, and put more effort and variation into the stylization of the text.

Parts of this webfolio I felt myself rushing to finish, as a peer review assignment couldn’t be done within the time I had planned to complete it due to a teammate’s late assignment. I was forced to reschedule my writing plan and focus on other areas first. After doing the layout and theme, I began with what I had that wasn’t going to be changing. Luckily, there were assignments that had earned a perfect score during the course which could be added into the webfolio without revision. After adding those assignments, I began revising in chronological assignment order, starting with the definition assignment deliverables, and so on. My LinkedIn profile was also a safe bet to include as it is just a hyperlink addition, and my unit reflections could be moved over from my student blog.

My home page for this webfolio is a little bit out of the ordinary. It is definitely not your typical webfolio introduction. I strived to encompass details beyond what is included within the webpages. I want to highlight not only what kind of work I do, but also what kind of person I am as that, I believe, is one of my greatest assets for what I want to do going forward in my career. As I continue to finalize my webfolio with the reminder of requirements, I hope to continue to encompass both who I am as a person and what I can do as a professional.

 

Writing the first draft of my formal report during a busy time in my life was a challenge. With my family moving homes, it was important for me to really organize my time to ensure that deadlines were continuing to be met. Collecting the data for my two surveys was fairly simple once I received approval from Dr. Paterson as it was just a matter of distributing over social media and email. However, once my surveys closed, a large challenge I faced with composing the draft was creating the graphs and figures from the data that was received. With so many key questions being asked, it was a struggle to not only create the appropriate graphics but to also decide on which were to be excluded from the report. As a psychology student, it was also an adjustment writing a full report in MLA and following the textbook’s guidelines, as I am so used to composing papers in APA format. It was important that I paid close attention to detail and changed the way I approached this assignment as it does not follow my “everyday university paper”.

Reviewing Christina’s report was a pleasure. I really enjoyed reading her report on overcoming the pandemic and socially distancing within her workplace. Because this assignment is such a large portion of our grades in this class, I really wanted to make sure that I was providing her with the best peer review that I could so that she would be able to improve her paper as much as possible. She provided an excellent review for me as well, and I wanted to return the courtesy. While peer-reviewing her draft, I tried to break it down by section as much as I could, providing both the positives and areas of improvement of her draft. Multiple passes of her report were needed for me to provide a proper review, as I wanted to be sure not to exclude anything important. While peer-reviewing takes time and can be tedious, it is a necessity for assignments such as these.

I think while finalizing my own report, I can indirectly learn from Christina; she has a very direct and concise writing style which helps keep her report within target length and this is something I am going to need to focus on achieving. Right now, my report sits at 21 pages, but with Christina’s suggestions, I am sure I will be able to achieve a page count closer to the target length while still maintaining quality within my report.

I look forward to completing my last few assignments for this course, but I know there is some more hard work ahead of me this upcoming week!

LinkedIn was not new to me before this course. For the past couple of years, I have been an active member on the platform, connecting with colleagues and my fellow UBC students. However, I am not a Sauder student, meaning that when I set up my LinkedIn account, I did not receive the same guidance and/or workshops that some other students have received on how to be a great LinkedIn member. Running my LinkedIn account on my own the last while has involved a lot of research, communication with others, and personal experimenting. Receiving a review on my profile for the first time is wonderful, as I now feel I better understand where I may need some improvement. Peer reviewing as a whole this unit has been very helpful and insightful. I feel that I look at my work in a different view more often than I used to, and at the same time, I am seeing the various writing styles for the same task by my teammates. Seeing a variety of interpretations and methods of execution within our writing styles provides ideas for my own writing down the road of this course. With the largest report coming up, it will be interesting to see how I decide to use some of my peers’ techniques within my own writing, while still making it my own. In addition, I am very thankful for the reviews I received from Eva and Max this unit, and I plan on using both to further my work.

After facing a small bump in the formal report process, accidentally releasing my study surveys too early, I was required to reset and readjust my strategy for working on this report. After some great help from Dr. Paterson, I now feel like I am back on track to collecting data for the report I plan on writing later this month. I feel confident that I will collect the information I need in order to make the case I am hoping to make on a topic I am very passionate about. It is rare to have this level of freedom in choosing a report topic, so I am excited to get started. At the same time, I have noticed that my teammates have proposed some intriguing topics, all of which vary drastically from each other, so I am excited to see what the lot of us produce.

The first unit was a nice introduction to this technical writing course. Before diving into a reflection on my own work and process, I want to thank Christina for writing a very simple, educational definition for such a complex term. I often find when learning medical terms, explanations can often be hard for a reader to digest after one pass. I found she did an excellent job of making periodontitis simpler to understand. When peer-reviewing her work, I started off by reading the assignment out loud. I find that this helps locate points in the writing that may not be fluid. In this specific case, I found that Dr. Paterson’s template was helpful. It helped me narrow down what to discuss about my teammate’s work. Something I have learned from Christina’s writing is that she is very articulate and is able to explain complex concepts in a simplistic way for everyone to understand. I also admire her creativity and ability to create a realistic scenario in the presentation of her work. Going forward, I hope to learn from her directness and apply it to my own work.

Choosing a word for my assignment was easy, yet difficult. It was easy for me to decide on picking a word from my residential building profession, but deciding on the exact term was difficult as there are so many to choose from. In addition, I would need to be able to explain it in a simplistic way for my peers and there are many terms where that would not be possible. Once I had decided on “arterial”, I found it challenging to rephrase the same definition in three ways. It is not very often that someone needs to explain a word in three different, expanded ways to someone, so my largest challenge was not being too repetitive or providing contrasting explanations accidentally.

That being said, Christina’s peer-review of my definition was extremely helpful. After reading her peer-review, it was very clear to me where I needed improvement in my assignment. Her review highlighted problematic areas that I did not originally catch. For example, “at-grade” is commonly used in my workplace, but to the common reader it may not be, and therefore needed further elaboration. Going forward, I think I need to more critically edit my work and think about it from the perspective of another person. Where can I elaborate more? Will the reader understand all that’s presented? Furthermore, I need to improve on better addressing an audience in all of my writing. In contexts like these, setting a clear audience is just as important as setting a clear thesis in a formal paper/report. I hope to achieve these improvements in my future assignments for this course.