The Final Reflection

As the first semester is coming to an end, I can say that I’ve learned a lot of new things across the many classes that I’ve taken this semester. I never expected to be taking an English class when taking a major in computer engineering, but the ENG 1101 class turned out to be very useful to me when learning new things and refreshing what I’ve learned in High school, even after everything I’ve learned from this class I still believe that this class can be useful even in the future.

At the beginning of this semester, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with everyone else and that it would be too overwhelming to deal with, and that was true for the first month of the semester since I’ve never heard of blackboard or used it so I was scared when problems weren’t solved the first time. Another fear I had at the beginning of this semester was trying to figure out how I was going to do the homework and school work without the appearance of a teacher since this class was asynchronous which I later learned that it’s a class that doesn’t meet at all online or in person, I was shocked because I didn’t know how I was going to get through the semester without even meeting my teacher when the answers to all my problems were to just click on the class and everything was provided from there her name, link if you need to email her, something called “Toolwire Completions”, and our course syllabus which tells us what classwork assignment is due every week and the projects that needed to be done which was the Educational Narrative”, Annotated Bibliography”, and the “New Genre”.

Throughout the three projects that I’ve been doing in this class, based on all the notes that I received from my teacher and all of my classmates it made me realize mistakes such as putting capitalized words mid-sentence when they didn’t need to be capitalized, misspelling words and mostly having run-on sentences in almost every paragraph. One example would be in my educational narrative “Every Class has a Purpose” when talking about the conversations I was having with my friends in popeyes I stated that “After a few seconds, he explained saying Take art class, for example, if you want to become an artist you don’t need to learn algebra to learn how to draw shapes” which make sense but I have a different perspective of this response so I replied with “Yea you might be right, but I think the reason why they’re doing this is that they know not everyone wants to do the same thing for there career but for the percentage that wants to become say an artist this class would be very important to them”. I thought this quote was really good and top-notch but after submitting it my teacher gave it a thorough look at my essay and saw that this is a run-on sentence along with some spelling errors and it wasn’t just in that one paragraph these run-on sentences were found in most of my paragraphs in the essay, but with a little research I found out how to get rid of run-on sentences and fixed it when we had to resubmit it again.

While participating in this class I also learned that I’m a person that likes to write about things that are happening in the world today and try to find a solution to solve that problem for the sake of creating a better future for everyone. In ENG 1101 we’ve learned how to write an annotated bibliography which is writing created from different sources for example one source is from a website and another from a news article but the topic I choose was Covid-19 and the vaccine since it was a hot topic for whats going on in the world today. Getting statistical information to help my research was pretty easy thanks to the CDC and other news articles, but what stood out to me during the project was when I was searching for the concerns people have about taking the vaccine and it was not good.  The website Time.com was the answer to this question, it provided a video that explained what vaccines are and how it relates to the Covid-19 vaccine, and in the video, it stated that ” 70% of Americans say that they would receive any kind of vaccine, the other 30% said that they would take their chances with the disease that has sickened tens of millions” which shocked me when I found this out because this told me that people would rather have a higher risk of getting Covid-19 then having a lower chance of getting infected. Time.Com also brought up the idea of herd immunity which is a thing where if almost everyone around you is vaccinated the disease wouldn’t be able to find a new host, but according to the website they state that ” It would require anywhere from 60%-70% of Americans to take the vaccine ” meaning that unvaccinated people are put in even more danger and higher risk of getting infected.

Although my major is focused more on computer engineering, this class would become useful later on in the future when I’m applying to jobs, looking at resumes, and what’s most importantly analyzing papers more closely to see if there are any mistakes. Computer engineering focuses mostly on the building but you need the right amount of parts to do it, usually, they have a list of all the parts received on a piece of paper and if not given a thorough look once or twice there is a change you can overlook the most important piece to your project and then your work is incomplete. Coding can be another example of how this class can be useful to people, even though coding has a few extra steps to it writing a program is similar to writing a sentence or a paragraph and spelling errors can play a major role when writing a program one wrong step and the program wouldn’t work or it would give you an entirely different program having you to skim through all of the work to find that one mistake.

In conclusion: This was a great class from beginning to end, although  I still wish that we could’ve done this in person so we would have the best college experience, it was still fun that I was able to connect with all of my classmates and my teacher through my writing. Thank you  Ms. Cipriani for teaching us everything and pushing us further on as we move towards the future.