Throughout this course, we had been introduced to much new knowledge on how to apply professional explanations on objects, how to collaborate and apply teamwork with your peer, learn how to research using a database and learn about the fundamentals of a lab report along with the topics that build up to a complete lab report. One of the new skills I developed in this course is to get advantage of the City College database, for my English 101 class I did get a chance to do some research online, but I didn’t know how to do the advanced searches, so the results came out to be a different thing. But when I was doing my research for the lab report analysis, I found this search option and it helped me sort out all the types of searches. The first time I used it I just searched for a topic and a ton of different writing that is related to the keyword I searched which includes articles, reports, books, etc… With the use of advanced searches, I locate only lab reports so when I search for the topic the first few search results that come up are related topics and in the form of the lab report. Using this way of searching saves me a lot of time allowing me to have more time to work on the actual analysis essay. I considered this as a new useful skill to obtain because in the future I’m sure I’ll be doing research no matter what job I do I used to search for the topics and just go pages and pages to try to find the information that would be helpful to me, now since I know how to take advantage to the advance searches I will now know when I do research in the future to do advance search instead of normal searches so I can have more time to work on my work.

            In this class, we have to do self-assessment on every work we have done and I feel like this is a good habit because now when we are done with our work we can think back and ask ourselves what we did great, what needs to be improved, what obstacles did we face while we are doing our work and by doing this we can improve ourselves and build up for experience for future work, so in case something similar happened if we had come across similar situations before we can know or at least have an idea on how to solve this. For example, when I was doing group work I didn’t do much communication with my partner, and most of the time I was just doing what they told me to or things that no one is taking care of, I didn’t realize at first until I was doing my self-assessment, while I was doing my self-assessment I think back and found out this problem and asked myself what could be done better or what should I changed for next time. So, I came to a result where I need to communicate with my group to assign parts of work to each member so that later when we are working to produce the actual work will know which part, we need to look for specifically and not just do what was left over. If I did this in our group project I believed that our group projects our final product would be more complete in all aspects including image, detail on size, pricing, more information during the presentation, more information on manufacturing, and lastly more in-depth information on how the production line of the invention like what machine we need, how much material does the machine need to use to produce X number of product and machines that is needed to complete the production line. Normally after the assignment is done, I will just move on to the next one but with the requirement of self-assessment I must spend time to think back on what I did, and it worked out to be very helpful.

            I also liked that we did peer views on the lab report analysis assignment and the technical description. We get to look at each other’s work and ask for feedback, sometimes when you are doing your work you won’t realize the small mistake you make, only others that didn’t attempt the work can find out about these mistakes since they have no idea what your work is about so their idea is unbiased and fair. Another good thing about peer view is that you can look at how your other classmate did their work and if you think they did something that you liked, or they did their work in a specific style that you feel like it’s nice then you can also include it in your work to make it better. The first I did my analysis for the lab reports I was confused and didn’t know which one is the correct format, and after I looked at how one of my peers did him, I have an idea in mine of how to write it. So, peer view not only helps you improve the work content but sometimes they can also help you structure and build your work in a better way.

            In this course, I also learned how to build my writing around one object and explain it in every aspect. The essays I’ve written before focus on writing from one specific point of view and support it with evidence. The essays I’ve written here in this class are mainly focusing on one main object instead of one idea, it is more detailed and has a smaller focus compared to the other ones. Writing in this way is a new experience for me but however, I feel like I like this type of writing more because instead of talking about an event, opinion, or point of view, I like talking about objects more since they are more interesting to me.

            In this course, I’ve also learned how to quote properly, in high school I was just doing it the old way which is using quotation marks and citing the text, and including the author’s name and title. But sometimes when I must use the same text, I always rewrite the author’s name and the title again and again making my work a little repetitive. Now that we have the bibliography, we can simply quote the text, write the author’s last name, and include the page number making things less repetitive. Also citing work like this can also make your text look clean and focus more on useful information. The use of biography was not introduced to me when I was in high school, and I was a little confused about how does it work in my English 101 class but now since we need to cite from multiple texts, and we must make it into a specific format it let me have a full understanding on how does citing work in college.

            I started to summarize my passage after I finished reading 1 paragraph. The lab report analysis was the first time I did it because it was required along with the assignment and since some lab reports are very long so making a little summary next to every paragraph makes it easier to read and understand the text. When I was little, I used to have post-it notes in the book I read just so I can write down a little summary in the book to help me understand. But starting in high school I stopped doing it and after this assignment, I started picking it back up, so I feel like this is also one of the things that help me.             In conclusion, a lot of the things we did in class were taught to us when we were little already but sometimes, we just forgot about it or stop doing it. Compared to English 101 this class helped me the most in picking up the old habits in writing and reading and I feel like it’s a good thing because those things do provide us with support when doing literature relate to action.