Alejandro Mendez

Self – Assessment

During this semester I have learned plenty of new material that involves writing a sophisticated and well organized research report. Thanks to Mr. Metenko’s opinions and feedback I can now see my mistakes and avoid these mistakes when there is a similar task at hand. My academic career goal was to improve my writing skills considering I want to major in engineering, I want to write a research paper that is simple, understandable and concise. I want these virtues in my paper because I think this is the way engineers communicate with one another. This involves much paperwork, project, meetings, and hands-on work which has to be reported in a concise way. I have done my fair share of research on what engineers do and even got to attend an engineering internship that has taught me about their workplace. 

I have achieved certain aspects of my goal but not all aspects. Examples of my goals that were reached is writing more than 5 pages per assignment, in a week. This could indicate that I am becoming more active with my work which leads to homework being completed on time. Although this would backfire soon as time progressed due to other homeworks that had to be completed. This would make me delay on the writing I was supposed to do for Mr. Metenko. Even if the homework is late, I still put my effort into all assignments. Writing a thesis is sort of troublesome because I tend to type the body paragraphs first and then write the thesis and intro. This is something I have grown to do more because having the body paragraphs outlined in a separate sheet benefits me on what to write on the intro and thesis. Then again I have to get used to writing a thesis more since this implies that I have a more general sense of what I am going to write and have some way of introducing it to the audience.

Not much of my perception of writing has changed due to me already having similar assignments and experiences in high school. As a writer I think I grew in the more technical standpoint by being more strategic with my assignments and descriptive by adding more details to my responses.

Body 1

In the following image I will show my draft for the memorandum and how I was able to do it. I counted on the sheet that Mr. Metenko gave me and this really aided me by having certain aspects that are needed to complete the assignment. This image also shows the added and deleted information I had to do due to the peer review. My fellow classmates left comments that I can’t restore but I could see the history of what I deleted and added. From the peer review I had learned from other students’ perspectives and learned how they’ve done their own memorandum which I could take inspiration from and apply these differences into my memorandum.

In this next image I will demonstrate how I did in my memorandum. In this assignment I seemed to not follow the rubric rules and would make mistakes with my grammar.

In this next assignment for the technical description I tried applying as much knowledge I could about the V8 engine. I wanted to try and describe each part of the engine. There was a similar example based on a plane that I took a liking to, and so I tried to apply these examples in my first draft. Soon I began having trouble since there were so many types of V8 engines that had different horsepower, different torque, different designs, which made it hard for me to identify which engine I was working on. This led me to delay my assignment due to not communicating with the teacher and not being able to decide on what engine I wanted to do research on. I really wanted to complete this assignment with my full interest, but this seems to have backfired due to me not understanding how to describe each part to the engines and how they work together. This assignment was a lesson to me because I did not spend that much time on this assignment and would focus more on trying to describe each part with their own functions. I did like how I described each component with their own purpose, I wish I had more time to complete the assignment properly.

The next image corroborates with the proposal assignment. This assignment was done in a group which was new to me. This involved a new criteria alongside the opinion of other fellow students with different opinions rather than just doing it my way. At this point in class I have noticed that writing can be a style that my fellow classmates or anyone in general can express themselves with what they know and that each person perceives things a different way. Things like politics, factual content, fiction like superheroes or even a simple assignment as the one for the proposal. This assignment was really interesting to  me because writing is not just to complete an assignment but a way to communicate with one another with factual evidence and from your own point of view. Now for this assignment I didn’t stand out as much as I wanted to, I just simply provided the evidence that was needed for the assignment, which is not a major part of the assignment.. 

For the final project, I believe I did a better job due to my group having more time to communicate and using the proposal as the draft. I did provide evidence for this assignment, did the graph, and completed the slides which I am satisfied with. Even though I did have some grammatical errors in the section where I provided evidence, I feel that I grew in this area, where I learned from the memorandum to connect details to what I am stating which I am proud of. 

Conclusion

Overall, I believe I need to improve on following instructions correctly and revising my work properly so that Mr. Metenko or any other professor can revise my work without a problem. Also in the future I plan on writing down ideas or brainstorming for a better sense of what I want to write about. For the memorandum I learned that I must write in a clear manner and connect my details to the problem at hand. From this assignment I learned that writing can be done for different purposes like the memorandum which reminds me of a complex letter, about a report. Now for the Technical Description I need to start putting more effort into what I am explaining, considering the repetitive mistakes I have made in my technical description. The technical description could’ve improved in many ways, it was just time management and communication that was the problem. I can say the same with the proposal, too much going on with my other classes and still no communication with the teacher. Now for the final project I did learn from my previous assignments and am glad to report on the level of work I’ve done and could see myself improve in all areas by devoting time and communicating more with the teacher.