11/20/19

Social Media, Formal Report Proposal, Peer Reviews: Unit Two Reflection Blog

Unit Two concluded just as quickly as it arrived — I can’t believe how fast time is passing this semester! Now that’s it’s over, I’ll take a moment to reflect on my experiences with the assignments.

Creating and maintaining a social media network is thrown into focus each time I am looking for my next opportunity, and my attitude toward it changes every time. When I created my profiles during my first job search, I did not have very much content to publish, but still attempted to stretch my participation in clubs and volunteer experience to tick the boxes of a “complete” profile. Now that I have more projects and work experiences to display, I gladly take the opportunity to present my work. Furthermore, by reaching out to others in hopes of receiving a referral or insight into the industry, I made a few friendships as well! Some strangers on the internet have become my colleagues, co-workers, bosses, and friends. My least favourite aspect of having a professional social media presence is having to update every page (LinkedIn, my website, AngelList, Xing, etc) following career/project changes, but luckily their formats are similar enough to permit copy-paste. Researching the best practices for LinkedIn profiles and networking has inspired me with further ideas to make my profile better, which I have incorporated into the most recent version of my page.

The Formal Report aspect of ENGL 301 kicked off with a formal report proposal. At first I misunderstood this to be done in groups, and once I came up with a report idea, I was hoping my team would like it. As it turned out, the reports are individually written, and thus I would begin writing about “Lecture Capture Systems in the Statistics Faculty at UBC.” This was a fairly straightforward assignment, but fitting my idea to the format in the textbook was still a challenge. As the report has progressed and the survey responses are being submitted, one question/challenge that I am facing is how to aggregate the survey responses into conclusions– so far the responses are too few in number to make any firm conclusions.

Since I’ve had the opportunity to do a few peer reviews now, I can feel that I’m getting better at writing them! Excluding personal pronouns, keeping them short, and also being informative is very challenging when writing the reviews, but also very satisfying to read once they are complete. This is a format I enjoy both on the sending and receiving end! I always value when others take the time to review my work and there are always helpful suggestions to improving my writing.

Overall, I enjoyed this unit of the course and I’m looking forward to future assignments. The gradual steps to writing the report make the whole project less intimidating, peer reviews are a tremendous help in catching mistakes and providing helpful advice, and the LinkedIn portion is already helping me on my job search.

Below are links to the revised Formal Report Proposal (following peer-review), and the peer review itself.

Formal Report Proposal Revised

Peer Review of Formal Report Proposal by Tarandeep Atwal