WESLEY BERRY

Over the course of English 301, I built on various communication techniques, while gaining insight into my own strengths and weaknesses. Practice and peer review processes enhanced my organizational and critical readings skills, which themselves deepen my awareness of communicative processes, composition, and reception.

In doing assignments, my “writing itch” served as a strength. Given time and interest, I am keen to sink my pen into written compositions and I enjoy the creativity of communication. Passion and interest serve as critical building blocks in crafting communication and English 301 provided the parchment for my ink.

Writing assistant, always a key contributor in the process

An inclination for writing extends to my learning tendencies in the realm, where hands-on work elucidates my strengths and shortcomings. The research project was a good example of this learning. While parts of the project were new mediums for me, writing, editing, and re-writing helped strengthen my capabilities in those areas. As a result, I feel increasingly comfortable scoping, organizing, and composing such research projects. While organization used to be my main focus, I’ve recently thought more about improving specific survey questions and techniques in the future, signifying my increased comfort level with this written medium.

I’ve also really appreciated the opportunities to learn from my peers. During the semester, comments from peers and evaluators helped elucidate my writing and style, heightening my awareness and contributing to communication abilities. Specifically, recommendations to vary my sentence length and tweak certain word choices helped shed light on the reception of my writing and I feel that utilizing these suggestions has made my writing smoother and more readable.

In observing my peers, I’ve also learned techniques for presenting and organizing information more effectively. Organizational strategies for creating consistent, coherent themes stand out and I’ve tried to build on and reflect these strategies progressively. My group mates used such approaches well in their application packages and research projects and it seems like a relevant approach to various forms of communication going forward.

Relatedly, English 301 has helped highlight aspects of my writing ripe for improvement. As demonstrated in my assignments, working on techniques to write with a concise “you” attitude will continue to strengthen my writing. Similarly, practicing the balance between casual and professional tones will help to harness a personable, professional, approachable style in my writing.

Increasing and augmenting my use of visuals might also benefit my communication skills. One of my group mates did this exceptionally well, using relevant pictures and diagrams to not only illustrate key points, but also supplement understandings of these points and enhance communication overall. Despite improving in this area over the semester, I still haven’t quite mastered the art of adeptly identifying and displaying pertinent information.

And despite my propensity for hands-on learning, it might also serve me well to work on learning through reading and observation. While hands-on learning is effective, balancing and supplementing myriad learning styles helps to amplify learning overall.

Honing my communication and learning abilities will remain a focus going forward. Communication is often critical to professional success and I believe a heightened awareness of complexities lends to communicative excellence in the professional world. Deft communicators relate to others well, ask effective questions, and provide positive and constructive feedback, and I expect to continue practicing these tenants in school and beyond.

Interaction skills extend to receiving communication, as well. From reading others’ writing to active listening, the ability to glean key messages lies at the heart of effective communication. As usual, this skill necessitates practice and the peer review process provided opportunities to gauge and grow this ability.

Building a web portfolio is more difficult than I thought. It isn’t easy putting together a set of pages and links that say, “Hey, here’s me online!” The art of balancing interests, personality, and professionalism is an ongoing practice and one I’ll have to keep honing going forward.

As usual, the crucial step for me was the first one: crafting the overarching themes of my portfolio. During the peer review assignments, I’ve observed my peers effectively establishing themes, which contribute to coherence and clarity overall. This strategy helped define my approach to building a portfolio.

Due to the team-knit/culture-fit perspectives of employers and potential team members in my field, I aim to underscore my personality and motivating passions in my web portfolio. Similar to the “Hey, here’s me!” perspective, my goal is to provide a window into my personality, interests, and trajectory.

Defining the theme of my web portfolio laid the groundwork for the rest of the process. Having an overall aim in mind focused my efforts and expedited decision-making. As a result, I feel that my web portfolio provides an authentic, genuine reflection of my personality and what it might be like to work on a team together.

Looking forward, this web portfolio seems like a solid foundation for an online professional presence. The next step might be to build an interactive personal website to supplement this presence, retaining the themes set forth in my portfolio. Building a personal website will utilize and expand on communication and computer science lessons learned, while providing experiences relevant to my desired career path. I will need to continue molding my ideas for uniqueness, but I expect the perspectives gleaned from English 301 will help my approaches to such a project.

Reflecting on the research project, I appreciate that the assignment allows students to pursue subjects of interest to them. I feel this perspective increases motivation for the report and endows the assignment with a deeper sense of gratification.

From my end, the project provides a platform to explore gender issues. My sociological interests have taken a backseat lately and this assignment allows me to investigate gender equality and expand on interests outside my typical course curriculum.

In crafting the project, I found planning to be the hardest part. Despite feeling this was a prime opportunity to explore gender issues in computer science, the scoping process and initial framing of my targeted issue was a challenge. I wanted a scope broad enough to access, but narrow enough to provide specific recommendations.

Bouncing ideas off the TA (thanks, Jasmine!) and peers really benefited this process. Given an iteration of my topic, fielding questions helped frame my scope and calibrate my thinking. I think the process of being questioned benefits various work forms, so I’ll keep this strategy in mind going forward.

After defining the scope and outlining the project, getting into the writing process became much easier. To this end, organization helped the project flow more fluently in concept and thought. My limited experiences in event planning elucidate similar perspectives and perhaps we can expand this process to many things in life. Often, starting and organizing are the hardest parts, but accomplishing these makes the rest come easier and more enjoyably.

The process of gathering data and writing the report was its own learning exercise and a reminder of the powers at work in this realm. When analyzing data, comparisons between quantitative and qualitative questions stood out especially. Where multiple-choice surveys are easy to distribute and quantify, open-ended responses provide more insight. Despite the additional time spent gathering and coding answers for analysis, open-ended responses (and the similarities between them) provided important perspectives for my analysis.

To this note, I was pleasantly surprised by participants’ depth and eagerness. Survey participants had the option to provide qualitative data with their quantitative survey results, and while there are always the odd “trolls” with trivial answers, a large number of participants provided insightful, thoughtful responses. Nice to know I hit on something others feel strongly about.

Such findings also elicited reflection on the process of acquiring quality answers. It is one thing to obtain responses, but attaining useful responses can be its own challenge. Moreover, answers may be affected by many factors, including respondents’ moods, levels of sleep, etc. We can never fully minimize respondent biases, so researchers and readers must remain aware of these influences when drawing conclusions. As an extension to this reflection, I wonder how multiple-choice questions appearing in my survey before the open-ended section might have primed people’s responses? Would the responses differ if the order were reversed?

Writing the report rough draft, I tried to be especially careful in balancing an analytical tone with voice and readability. Analytical compositions should read appropriately, but from my own experiences, I really appreciate a little humor or personality interspersed. I tried to balance these aspects appropriately.

Relatedly, consideration of the target audience’s perspectives, incentives, and reception was an interesting and challenging exercise. This seems like a crucial part of effective communication and a good skill to hone.

I also found myself editing out a lot of repetition, which provided insight into my writing style. As relevant information bridges between sections, I tend to repeat material in order to make things exceptionally clear at every step. In reading my partner’s work, I gained some insight into effectively flowing between sections without repetition.

Speaking of the peer review, I appreciated reading my partner’s work and learning from her writing. She is efficient and effective with her word choice, contributing to a cohesive analytical piece.

My peer’s research also elicited considerations on data presentation. Where she stepped through every question, extrapolating key points, I focused on specific data and glossed over non-determinative bits. I believe both strategies are effective, given different data sets and respondent pools, but my peer’s approach is one I’ll keep in mind while crafting the final draft. Burrowing and extrapolating helps demonstrate key points and provides an effective, consistent framework for analytical compositions.

LinkedIn

Creating a LinkedIn profile is inspiring, thought provoking, and a little intimidating. Going over my past experiences and defining the relevant details was a difficult process. Which responsibilities and accomplishments do I include from positions no longer relevant to my professional trajectory? For example, my experiences increasing online sales in the hospitality industry has very little to do with programming or software development. On the other hand, this example shows I can set, plan, and accomplish goals in a professional setting (using computers!). Ultimately, this process of reflecting and deciphering which skills transfer relevantly from my “past life” to my current trajectory is an ongoing and eye-opening exercise.

In creating a LinkedIn page and looking around the site, I found myself inspired and excited about the future. There are a lot of people doing a lot of cool things and the potential to launch into such communities is exhilarating.  Moreover, this highlights the importance of networking via LinkedIn and other outlets.  Keeping these networks active and up-to-date will be an important goal moving forward.

Report Proposals

On the report proposal front, I really like the open-endedness of the assignment, which allows us to explore individually-meaningful subjects. For my report, I am investigating gender inclusivity at UBC’s computer science-based TechTrek event, a subject right up my hybrid computer science-sociology alley. This report should give me an opportunity to explore gender inequalities—a subject I’ve studied in the past—and relate it to my current field of study. This will also broaden my awareness of social scenarios in scientific industries.

As far as the writing process, having a set journey through the different stages of the report makes it clear how the whole thing should come together structurally. At the same time, I am not totally sure what to expect from the results of my research, which will make for interesting analysis and writing.

Peer Reviews

Peer reviewing proposals endows deeper understandings of external perspectives, informing my own directions for the proposal. For example, a specific comment from my peer reviewer caused me to identify a more quantifiable goal for my proposal. After incorporating this suggestion and re-reading, I realized the strength it lends to the piece overall and I will try to utilize this strategy more in the future. It is one thing to surmise on a general solution, but specifying exactly what you want to accomplish adds authenticity and a stronger sense of purpose overall. It was really great to get this bit of feedback.

Reading my peer’s research proposal further elucidated this strategy. My partner’s work was clear and articulate and the use of specific numbers and examples aided in the clarity of her proposal. This realization will guide my future writing, while reminding me to ask, “How do specific details add value to the piece as a whole?”

As a whole, the peer review process has been great practice and an eye-opening exercise. Reviewing my peers’ works and having my own writing reviewed bestows new insights and greater understanding of successful strategies, including how and why they work.

As we continue reviewing each other, I also become more comfortable with the whole review process.  While it can be intimidating, having your one’s work critiqued is a powerful way to grow. Practicing this process makes it less daunting and easier to access this important resource.

On the other side, practice in reviewing other students’ writing allows me to reflect on what comments, strategies, and attitudes can best contribute to their developments and to our progress as a group.

Revised Report Proposal

2:1 – Peer Review for Wes Berry

Peer Review for Alexis Jensen – 2:1

It is one thing to understand a term over time through familiarity and experience, but defining it to a non-technical audience is a challenge all its own. This assignment was a good exercise in explaining a familiar term through various methods, while concurrently demonstrating the inherent jargon and concepts taken for granted. From the writer’s perspective, this also helped elucidate which components I understand best and least. Covering all angles helped to smooth this knowledge.

The definitions exercise also demonstrated the usefulness of visuals in explanation. Eliciting the adage “a picture says a thousand words”, visual aids helped delineate tough concepts.  This tactic was especially prevalent when peer-reviewing, as I found that the visuals accompanying my classmate’s assignment helped provide further context, while allowing the author to demonstrate concepts colorfully.

To this note, I really enjoyed reading other students’ definitions. It was interesting seeing others’ writing styles and doing so helped frame my own writing more critically. By engaging in the reading experience, I observed which techniques were particularly effective. For example, short paragraphs and concise sections increased readability, while piquing interest.  I will try to incorporate these ideas into my own compositions going forward.

I also enjoyed learning new concepts in the peer evaluation process, while identifying the pros and cons of the different definition methods. Reading various methods for a single concept clearly showed the differences between these methods, demonstrating the roles of details, diction, and structure in defining a term.

Gaining feedback on my own assignment helped contextualize my writing, while elucidating the knowledge areas I take for granted. Generalizing this lesson, I will enhance my awareness of the assumptions made in communication. While there are situations where assumptions are appropriate, assumption awareness is crucial to communication

Rewritten Definition Assignment

Peer Review: http://engl301.arts.ubc.ca/2016/01/29/assignment-13-peer-review-for-wes-berry/

2366 Main Mall

Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4

January 15, 2016

English 301 99C

Department of English

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, BC

Dear English 301 Classmates,

I am a fourth year computer science student interested in app development and human-computer interactions. A big fan of collaboration, I look forward to learning from your perspectives and I feel my dependability, skills, and perspectives would be a boon to your team.

Teamwork and collaborative learning underscore my professional and academic experiences. Most recently, I worked in education software, where my team developed automated tests and frameworks for screening product releases, while adeptly communicating internally and with related teams. Similarly, my academic career is filled with team writing initiatives, from cognitive systems designs and reports to app documentations.

As a teammate, I am a dependable, hard worker who works efficiently and accurately. I am proficient in structuring written communication and technically sound with spelling and grammar. Moreover, my past experiences in group settings highlight an importance on team communication and I am quick both to reach out and respond. Likewise, I aim to be approachable and open-minded with a focus on active listening.

While I am a big picture-focused learner, I sometimes get too caught up in the process and details of writing, stalling on the most ideal word choice or searching compulsively for a perfect quote. In times like these, I try to move forward and come back later, trusting my future self to either craft the right diction or decide it is not important.

As a learner, I believe independent and collaborative learning systems work together harmoniously and beneficially. It is great to buckle down and focus as an individual, especially when you’re in a writing zone and words fly onto the page. Other times, it is beneficial to bounce ideas off others, allowing external thoughts and perspectives to supplement and inspire your own.

Ultimately, I believe we all bring unique abilities and perspectives to the table and I look forward to sharing ideas and learning collaboratively. You can email me at wes.berry1@gmail.com and best of luck to all in the team-building process!

Sincerely,

Wes Berry

Word Document Version: 301 Wes Berry Application Letter