REFLECTION

The course ENG2003 – Effective Engineering Communication is where students learn to effectively employ communication strategies essential to a successful engineering career, including the social, rhetorical, ethical, and practical aspects of professional communications. My overall experience with the course has been great as it allowed me to explore and learn more about communicating effectively. Given the timeframe for the course I feel that it was able to touch on everything needed for an aspiring engineer like me to succeed in my future career. Course topics such as job resumes, cover letters, interviews, axioms of communication, the 7 Cs, writing technical reports, and oral presentations are all skills and knowledge that are useful and helpful for me moving forward. The course for the most part was what I expected for engineering communications like the resumes, cover letters, job interviews, and writing reports. But topics such as the axioms of communications or the stem pipeline and journey was not something I expected but I could see how this would be potentially helpful as it provides a general guide to communication. I also expected the course to focus more on the engineering job preparations. I thought we would be spending more time learning about the skills that an engineer would need to land a job and maintain a job. But we only briefly touched upon such topics like the job interview where we only had a brief lesson on and then immediately went on to do mock interviews. Given the timeframe it was expected since I believe the course wanted to cover as much base as possible given time restrictions. I do say that one of the course contents I found most useful is writing a technical report and the skills surrounding it like revising, editing, peer-reviewing, researching, and so on. As a future engineer, I know that I will be writing a ton of different kind of reports for my future career. This experience will be my guide and the knowledge and skill I have learned from this will be helpful in writing future reports. I have no prior experience writing such technical report in the past, so this course pushed me out of my comfort zone in trying my hand at one. Overall, writing the technical report was an amazing experience as I was working on a topic that I was interested in which was autonomous vehicle technology. Throughout the duration of making this report I was constantly learning new skills on how to make a great report and new knowledge about autonomous vehicles. Another topic I found interesting was the 9 axioms of communication which was unexpected. I think this is because my verbal communication skills are lacking that I find this topic interesting. It provides me a guide and general idea on how to communicate better. The axiom that stuck with me the most is axiom 9 which is “Communication is pervasive; you cannot not communicate” (MacLennan, 2009, p.16). I can relate to this well as I am a very introverted person and would rather not interact with other people. But from now on this axiom would remind me that communication is everywhere and is unavoidable. Once I start communicating it would be a doorway to interactions and relations.

 

ENG2003 – Effective Engineering Communications is a course that develops the student’s skills to communicate effectively. Before this course my communication abilities which I would split into 3 types written, visual, and verbal I would say were different for each type. In terms of written and visual communication I believe are skills that I was good at while my verbal communication was bad. But after ENG2003 I feel that all aspects of my communication skills written, visual, and verbal all improved as I was able to learn new techniques and knowledge. Especially when it comes to written communication techniques, course content like the resume, cover letter, and technical report all required written communication skills. Being able to effectively convey my thoughts, ideas, experience, and personality in written form. Visual skills improved as I worked on tasks such as the brochure and making visually appealing presentations. Finally, doing tasks like the job mock interview and recorded oral presentations pushes me out of my comfort zone and makes me try to be better in communicating verbally. As mentioned before, I think my written communication skills have improved the most. Most of the tasks were written which I didn’t have much difficulty doing as I like it the most and comfortable doing so. I learned how to properly format a job resume and what to write in a cover letter. The technical report was something I have not done before which was scary but now that I have done it was not as bad as I initially thought it was. Through these written tasks I learned a variety of skills and knowledge that will be useful and be a guide in my future career. But a communication skill that still needs a lot of improvement on is my verbal skills. The main issue with me when it comes to verbal communication is I easily get nervous and anxious speaking which results in me stuttering, quickly losing my train of thought, and the constant use of filler words (e.g., uhm). I think that all I need is more practice and experience in talking to an audience to reduce nervousness and anxiety. Overcoming this difficult task would allow me to become a more effective communicator. All the knowledge, skills, and experience I have gained from this course will be a guide for me to use in other course and ultimately in my future career. These are the stuff that will remain with me and will always keep in mind as I go through my engineering career.