Coming into this class at the start of the semester, I was really nervous. I’ve never been and still am not a proficient or good writer. My friend took this class last semester and from what he told me about the papers he had to write, I already knew I wasn’t going to enjoy the class. The main reason for this, I think, is that I do not have the patience or skill to write long papers that require outside knowledge/research. During this semester, I really struggled to complete the assignments on time. Having other difficult classes like Calc II and Physics 207 that require a lot of time didn’t help. I also went away to Ecuador for a week which also didn’t help. From there on, I was behind on all my classes and I don’t think I ever fully recovered.

My first assignment for the class was a letter of introduction in a Formal Letter format to professor Davidow. The main focus for the letter was to introduce myself and my goals for this semester. In the letter, I talked about my interest and fascination for cars and how majoring in mechanical engineering could help me further explore the car world. My goals for the class, I mentioned, was to learn more about what goes on in the engineering world.

The next assignment was a Technical Description about a simple everyday object. I chose to write about a mechanical pencil for this assignment. This is were the struggling for the semester began. I remember I left this assignment to basically the last minute I think. Some comments that I got back from the professor was that the introduction was too short, I didn’t do proper citations, the reference page wasn’t properly done, and I didn’t do a reflection letter.

The final project for the class was a Engineering Innovation Proposal. We worked in a group of four for this assignment. It was hard to complete, mostly because of finals week and it was hard to find the perfect balance for time spent between all my classes. This assignment definitely taught me how to work in groups and how every single person is crucial to the completion of the assignment especially since the way we did it is we split up the work by sections and assigned each section to someone. It was also hard to find the correct flow between sections since we all write differently, so to make sure the whole project flowed smoothly was of great importance.

Overall, I think I wasn’t at my best this semester, and not just this class but all my classes. Something I still don’t fully understand is the different citation styles. I’ve always been a great student back in high school so to see myself struggle like this is completely foreign to me. What this semester has taught me is that I was simply not good enough. I need to do better. No other way around it, I just have to improve.