Welcome to my blog! Here you will find my reflections on the assignments and experiences of ENGL301.

In the beginning of the term, the Course Description and Schedule pages seemed very overwhelming. “Look, how much I will have to do!”, I was thinking. But the time went by fast and the three months of the summer term condensed into just a couple of posts, described below.

The first blog “The Art of Writing Definitions” discusses an interesting task of writing different kinds of definitions, as well as first experiences with peer reviewing and self-editing.

In the Unit 2 blog we take a break and discover a wealth of useful advice about networking via LinkedIn and dive back in through writing and revising a proposal for a formal report.

In “The Journey of Writing the Formal Report” you can read about my struggle of researching and actually writing the first draft of the formal report.

In the very “meta” post titled  “The Experience of Creating this Web Folio”  you can learn about creation of the very Web Folio you are exploring right now.

Lastly, in “Self-Assessment Reflection” I assess my abilities and relate them to my career future.

My Strengths… and Weaknesses

Assessing one’s self is always a challenging exercise, since a person is given an advantage of direct introspection, but a disadvantage of a possible ego-backed blind spot(s), but I will try to do my best nevertheless. I think that my biggest weakness in learning style in this course was my inability to keep up with a predefined schedule, and as a result, leaving oftentimes work to the last minute. This reveals some organizational challenges which I encountered during several of my assignments. Regarding to the assignments themselves, in the beginning of the term, I described wordiness to be my biggest challenge. Now, I still think that it is the case, despite the fact that I have seen some improvements. Furthermore, the problem with awkward phrasing also became less prominent, since I started to proofread my work more carefully, but it also persists.

Among my strengths, I believe that the most significant is habit to approach writing systematically. No matter what assignment I am doing, I start from understanding the requirements, jotting down ideas, then outlining, and then writing. This keeps the process moving and makes writing itself seem less daunting. I know that this saves me a lot of time since every time I am trying to break the sequence and write something without a plan, I start to procrastinate and my writing becomes less coherent and clear. A strength in my assignments would be perhaps trying to identify the learning purpose of the assignment and not trying to “cut corners”. Instead, I am trying to feel that I am learning something, to grow my knowledge “database” of what I learned, rather than leaving assignment at the state of minimal requirements. That is, I always strive to reflect on my learning, on my mistakes to not to make the same one twice.

How do Strengths and Weaknesses Relate to my Future Career?

I think that the strengths and weaknesses described above directly relate to my future career. The ability to be systematic in doing tasks would certainly help in finding a job, for example, as it requires applying to dozens or hundreds of places, and organizing a library of cover letter paragraph or phrase templates, for example, helps a lot. Also, being systematic would certainly help in getting through a job training or learning a new skill, or getting a smaller certificate/skill in an online course to further my career. Always striving to get learning outcomes would also be beneficial for my future career, as in order to learn new skills, one certainly needs to first want to learn them, and I feel I always have a motivation for that.

On the other hand, my organizational struggles could certainly hold me back. Perhaps being slightly out of sync with your work is not too bad sometimes, but in a dynamic environment of a software company, delaying a project or postponing important tasks would not be beneficial. Even little things, such as checking email inbox on time, replying to messages and updating task lists can be important. So I think that in order to utilize my strengths to the fullest, I have to overcome my organizational challenges by building positive habits in my daily life.

As part of the assignment to create this Web Folio, we were tasked to reflect on the process of designing. Overall, creating the Web Folio was a deceptively simple task – just organize bits and pieces of all the previous work in one place and make it look appealing. The reality, however, proved to be much more time consuming, and the devil was exactly in the details. Every page needed a description and every single work needed a final proofreading before it was placed in the Web Folio. Just filling in all the little things took most of the time but was worth it. So in the end, the most challenging thing was to get all the requirements right, which I hopefully did.

An interesting aspect of creating the website was that weird feeling that I had when proofreading my previous works. It was similar to looking at an older picture of yourself. Coming back to something that was written months ago felt interesting and also revealing of how much progress was done and how much work was put into this course.

Lastly, there were the design considerations to make the website user-friendly and easy to navigate. I thought that these aspects were essential, because a Web Folio needs to persuade, and for that it needs to be easy to digest. All the work in adding the hyperlinks and descriptions should finally pay off, as this in my view, would decrease the amount of cognitive work a reader would need to do to discover my work and resume.

Researching and Organizing the Report

As part of Unit 3 we were tasked with researching and planning for the upcoming formal report assignment. For the topic of graph visualization, I found that conducting the necessary research was not challenging. Indeed, the subject matter of graph visualizations for knowledge bases is relatively novel and allows for a creative input rather than dependence on existing research.  What was challenging is designing and conducting polling with the target audience. Since the questions required producing visuals and were targeted at measuring various aspects of perception, designing the questionnaire was a difficult and frankly a procrastination-inducing process. This, coupled with a low turn-out of responses, taught me a few things about designing such polls. First, the questions need to be as simple and clear as possible, and it is not a trivial thing to do. Most of the people who completed the questionnaire and whom I know noted the difficulty of my questions. Second, questions really need to be designed carefully since the data from the answers is the only data that will be available and re-running an updated poll would be difficult. On the other hand, analyzing data and subsequently structuring my report by writing a detailed outline was enjoyable and exciting. The data produced enough of interesting insight to incite my curiosity and motivation.

Writing the Draft

As a logical consequence of planning and gathering data, the next assignment of Unit 3 was to complete an initial draft of the formal report. Out of all challenges, the most difficult thing about writing was battling against procrastination and adhering to a pre-defined schedule. Seeing an empty skeleton of the formal report was the hardest moment to push through. However, having a schedule as well as a detailed outline allowed to eventually get unstuck and get to work. With the outline and the gathered data, writing the first draft was similar to filling blanks on a test and was the least demanding part of the process. In addition, since it was just a draft, the pressure of preparing a full report was taken off, and writing proceeded in a smooth singular stroke, as I knew I could change and improve any part of the draft later. The main things that I learned from that experience was that having a pre-defined structure and content, which included the proposal, the outline as well as the data analysis helps a lot in moving the project forward. However, as it turns out, I still need to develop a skill of escaping the inescapable spiral of procrastination by developing a habit of working in small steps in advance.

Peer Review

In the last part of Unit 3, we were tasked with writing a peer review on a formal report of one of our team members. The review process was different from the previous peer reviews in a way that we were not reviewing the final product, so to speak, but something intermediary and in many respects raw. However, I realized that a lot of review in actual working environment would be just like that – an intermediate step in a multi-stage iterative process of preparing an important document. Reviewing an incomplete work may not offer a full picture but allows for early suggestions of major issues that can be addressed promptly, rather than haphazardly right at the deadline. Another learning point was that a review of a lengthier work, such as a report, has slightly different considerations. It is possible to include only so many little details in a limited space of a review, and a big picture outline is much more valuable and effective. After receiving a review of my own report, I noted similar insights. It was pleasing to read that elements of style and flow were well done, and the content was easy to understand. I felt that that was the result of improving my skills throughout this course and understanding the reader’s perspective better. However, some technical mistakes still remain, though it is clear that none will be hard to fix in the final revision.

Networking via LinkedIn

One of the assignments for Unit 2 of the ENGL301 course was to conduct research on best practices for networking on LinkedIn. Many sources that I found agreed on several important points about networking, namely, that one needs to complete the profile, keep it up to date, perform timely engagement with the network and create relevant content. All of these require good habits as well as good knowledge of various functionalities that LinkedIn has. I found that the necessary skills and habits are similar to those that we already study in ENGL301. For example, the ability to write concisely and persuasively while maintaining the appropriate tone would be essential in completing one’s personal profile as well as in communicating with potential connections. Even though I already have a profile on LinkedIn, I never actually used it effectively to build my professional network. The research exercise shifted my attitudes towards LinkedIn from that of apathy to a genuine interest. Learning about various features and the importance of building one’s professional network early on motivated me to plan to input more effort to maintain my presence in the social network.

If you are interested in reading the final draft of my LinkedIn best practices memo you can find it here.

Formal report proposal

A major part of Unit 2 of ENGL301 was brainstorming and developing a proposal for what is going to be a formal report. After the proposal was done, an outline and a progress report needed to be completed shortly after to keep the formal report project on track. The process of brainstorming was not very challenging, as the instructions aided the process very much. The key to finding an appropriate topic was the tip to find an area that relates to personal experience and immediate environment and does not require a lot of literature research. Given these recommendations, I quickly came up with a few topics to which I have a direct relation now. So, after a short period consideration I decided to work on something that I am actually working on currently, namely visualization of networked data. Once the problem was chosen, preparing a proposal was not challenging, since examples were given in the textbook and the instructor’s blog. The main considerations while writing the proposal was making it persuasive and focused. In order to make sure that the proposal had these qualities I used a technique, where I would stop working on it for some time and return and re-read it with a fresh mind. Needless to say, that helped a lot. As for how the report progress is going, I feel slightly behind the schedule that was set out in the progress report, but it is still possible to keep things on track. I have a general idea of how it is going to come all together, which makes the actual writing and planning simpler. However, as with any other work, the vision of the report develops and matures as the progress continues.

If you want to read the final version of my proposal you can find it here. Likewise, the final draft of my progress report can be found here.

Peer review and proposal revision

The process of writing the first draft

As an assignment in unit one of ENGL301 course, we were asked to write three definitions of a relatively complex term for a non-technical audience. The three definition types were parenthetical, sentence and expanded. At the time I knew nothing about how to compose them, which was the first challenge for me. However, as I was writing I learned the relative importance of each definition type, as well as how the situation and audience affect what should be included and how. Tailoring the expanded definition to the audience with no technical background was the second challenge of the assignment. I chose “High-Density Lipoprotein (HDL)” as the topic for my definition, and since I am used to scientific jargon, it was difficult to come up with a way of explaining the term simply and clearly. Trying to look at my writing from a perspective of another person and revising several times helped a lot. The next learning outcome was discovering various ways in which a definition can be expanded depending on the context. In the case of HDL definition, I decided to add a section explaining the relation of HDL to cardiovascular health, since the reading situation was a health brochure. Overall, this seemingly simple assignment, was a rich source of learning and writing practice.

Peer Review

After completing the first draft of the definitions assignment, I was given an opportunity to review the work of my teammate and to compose a peer review document based on that. This exercise allowed me to analyze a different take on the same assignment, which broadened my perspective on writing. A major learning point was to write a constructive and useful criticism of someone’s work. It was difficult to combine all the suggestions together into a coherent and sectioned document. A crucial insight for was that a peer review may not be meant for the original writer only, but perhaps for a larger audience. This meant that a review should combine suggestions and praise concisely and still be understood by a third reader (other than the reviewer and the writer). During the review, I also realized the extent to which the same piece of writing can appear very clear to the writer, and yet very confusing to the reader (myself). This highlighted the importance of practices that we learn in this course – avoiding pronouns or wordy expressions – as they are often the cause of such confusing language.

Self-editing

After completing the peer review, I have received a review with criticism of my own work. That provided me with a valuable perspective of a reader and a direction in which to revise my first draft. I was glad to read that she was able to understand my definition and had an overall positive impression. The reviewer was also very helpful, for example, in identifying the need to change the order of the paragraphs in the expanded definition to achieve a better flow. Also, the criticism helped me realize a few awkward phrases with multiple jargon words, which I was able to rewrite into a simpler form. Furthermore, the instructor blog proved to be an invaluable resource in the revision process. For example, I found several places where I could simplify wording. For example, “inner core” was revised to be just “core”, as there is only one core in the lipoprotein particle. Furthermore, in a couple of places I was able to fix ambiguous prepositions, such as “their” in the introduction, which I did not notice as unclear before. In summary, having an outside perspective and keeping in mind general tips from the instructor helped me revise my definition draft into a clearer and more concise read.

If you are interested in reading the final draft of my definition assignment you can find it here.