Author: Matthew

Matthew Samaroo

English 1121

2/11/20

Rough Draft

Word Count: 823

Unit 1: Discourse Community Analysis

A discourse community at City Tech that I’m a part of is a remote sensing lab course with three other students in my major. My major is electrical engineering technology and telecommunications and we became a group at the start of the fall 2019 semester working on a circuit design for the CRSP (Cuny Research Scholars Program) conducting undergraduate research of wireless sensor networks with our mentor and the chairperson of the department Prof Wei. When Prof. Wei was advising me for my classes in fall 2018, we discussed how the experiments would be conducted. I initially assumed that we would each type our own individual lab reports and submit to Prof Wei but instead we had to create a google docs and collaborate each other’s individual research and results. Our goal was to research the five different types of wireless sensor networks and their applications in which we would use the knowledge from our electrical drafting course with the autocad computer aided design program to design the components for our project. After the designing phase, my group tested each component in the lab experiment and created written reports of our analysis to give to our mentor and create a formal presentation with a poster to submit to the CRSP. The characteristics that make our undergraduate research group a discourse community are our common goals to learn modern electronics outside of our classes and receive intern opportunities from the department upon completion of the program such as MTA or Con Edison.

Since I am a member of this discourse community, I researched this group through observation during our weekly sessions in the lab. Our methods of communication in the group are texting and email on our google accounts. We primarily use our google accounts because of the lab reports that we complete on google docs allowing us to collaborate our ideas, share lab results, and edit any sections of the lab report completed by other members. In the group texts, we discuss the next steps for our project and designate roles based on each other’s skillset. Prof Wei is the leader of our group and he texts us our roles such as “Ronald will create the model of the network using Autocad, share the model on google docs so Matthew can test the circuit in Multisim for proficiency and we’ll meet on Wednesday to conduct the experiment with the components in the lab”(Wei). The way that we communicate makes us unique because our mentor allows us to discuss our individual ideas to improve the project instead of only the mentor telling us what the next phase is and how to do it. This community value each member’s ideas and any obstacles we encounter such as a component of the network being damaged due to excess heat generated in the circuit or the circuit consuming high amounts of voltage, we are able to troubleshoot as a team to fix/improve our project.

In order to become a member of this group, you must have completed the six first-year EET courses in the major with a GPA of 2.8 or better and have at least 40 hours completed in both electric machines theory and digital electronics laboratories. A person interested in joining this group would need to know about the three main computer aided design programs (Matlab, Multisim, and Autocad) and be proficient with at least one of these programs in order to complete each stage of the project. A person would also be expected to have already learned about the different components from the lectures in the six first-year courses to understand the experiments in the remote sensing laboratory.

During my interview with two of the group members, I learned new things about them that I didn’t know when I was working with them for nine months. One of the members Dominic was two semesters away from completing his bachelor’s degree and his mother went to Pace University studying in business administration but she was unable to finish because of the high tuition costs. Dominic told me his mother’s experience in college and his future goals because he wanted to make his mother proud that he may not have been the first one to go to college but he will be the first one in his family to finish with a degree. Another one of the members that I interviewed was Ethan Brown and he told me that his father owns an architecture firm in Manhattan. Ethan wanted to become an electrical engineer because he saw how the technicians were installing the electrical systems based on the blueprints of the architects floor planning design for a new building. Learning about their stories and experiences that developed their interest in electrical engineering surprised me and helped me understand how our goals in this major connects us as one community.

 

Work Cited

• Wei, Xinzhou. Text message to CRSP members. 30 January.2020