My name is Jeremiah Rodriguez, I am an 18 year old first year undergraduate student at the City College of New York looking to pursue a career in chemical engineering.

The Shadow Subject; Learning How Engineers Write

Writing has never been my area of expertise. I have always been more of a math guy myself. I assumed that choosing a career path like engineering I’d be able to get away from the writing. But no, its back once again, like a shadow its always with me no matter where I go. So going into a writing for engineers class I definitely was nervous about what my semester would be looking like. The first day was calm and relieving. I started to feel more secure about how I will be able to do in this class.

The first assignment was the introductory paragraph. This was an awkward paragraph to write because I find writing about myself to be quite difficult. I did enjoy looking over the paragraphs of my peers and seeing the distinctions in their writing and using that to try and add to my own. Differentiating between skills and traits was also somewhat confusing. It is very easy to put everything into either traits or skills as opposed to separating them. But I think that putting mind to figuring out exactly what my strengths and weaknesses are will be beneficial to me and my classmates who also had this assignment.

Making a resume was much needed because I have not updated mine in a while. This was also my first time making a cover letter. Writing it was interesting because it felt like I had to minimize the amount words I use in order to make it more to the point so trying to make it as short yet still informative as possible was interesting. Creating the resume is more fun than the cover letter. But that is mainly due to the process of making it look nice. I think it gives room for you to add some personality if you choose to do so.

The lab report was an interesting assignment for me. I was fresh off recovering from covid, and the due date for the assignment was coming up in just a couple of days. Thankfully, Mr B gave me an extension given the circumstances. Think of a way to make my proposal unique was difficult, but I figured that I should have a clear vision of the purpose of the report. After deciding on the direction I wanted to take the assignment the next step was to find good sources that closely relate to my specific aim. This ended up being more difficult than I thought it would be. Eventually I found enough to be able to form my hypothesis. Next was the actual experiment. It was fun to do and record my notes. But then I ended up deleting them by accident. So to save some time I simulated 100 dice rolls in Microsoft Excel, which in hindsight was much faster and a lot more efficient. After that all that was left to do was present the information I had gathered up to that point. I did this through writing and making tables to display test results so the whole process was simple and quick.

I also missed the majority of the group proposal project. My group ended up being called The Syntax Savants, I joined late compared to others in the class however. Figuring out my role in the group was difficult due to me missing the classes where the assignment was explained. But my group members were patient and understanding which made the whole process smooth.

The technical description was the most interesting assignment this semester in my opinion. I had a general idea of what I wanted my topic to be from the beginning. But once I actually started doing the research I learned how broad osd (oral solid dosage) production is. The different directions I could have taken the assignment was overwhelming so I knew that I had to get more specific. After taking the audience and purpose I decided on how I wanted to tackle the issue at hand. I chose a more gateway simplistic approach. This was in order to be as clear and easy to understand while also providing what I believed to be a suitable amount of information. And there was a perfect amount of introductory information about tablet manufacturing to do exactly that. The topic was something I was interested in so the research went smoothly since it was easy to get invested in what I was reading about. For the poster I just printed out the notes I had taken up to that point. The main issue was deciding what information goes onto the poster and what does not in order to avoid overcrowding. I feel like the actual presentation part went well. I feel like I improved as the class went on. But I think I presented the information well and how exactly how I envisioned it.

Overall, I could not truthfully say that I was looking forward to taking a writing based engineering class at the beginning of the semester. But now that the semester is over I can confidently say that I was presently surprised with my experience in this class. I feel like my writing process has improved in a way that I feel happy with and can continue to build upon in the future.