Throughout my time in this class, I’ve improved on my writing skills and finally understand why this course was a requirement for my major. In the beginning, it didn’t feel like I was learning anything new, but I now see that I’ve been practicing my collaboration and research skills in a way that will be helpful for my career. I’ve always been interested in scientific research and STEM education, so I’m glad that this course included group projects, a research paper, and a presentation component. In terms of achieving the course goals, I believe that I’ve accomplished several of them, but still have a few that I need to work on. 

In the two group projects I’ve completed, I felt that I worked well with my team and contributed to a final product that we all felt proud of. However, there wasn’t much collaboration on the actual writing components, or even the planning of what we would all be writing. Instead, we split up the work and worked together afterwards, when we looked over the papers and edited. Had we planned together beforehand, there would’ve been a stronger synthesis of the ideas that we all contributed. 

The final project (the research paper and all its components), is definitely where I grew the most in terms of my writing. Although I already have some research background and have practiced searching for and utilizing scientific papers in high school, this class gave me a much-needed refresher on it. I am now much more confident in my abilities to seek out strong sources, and I think this is evident in the sources I used for my research paper. My sources were all great choices for the arguments I was making. However, this is a skill that I can always improve on, as some of my searches were probably less efficient than they could’ve been.  

When it comes to integrating the sources into my text, I believe I need a lot more practice before I can consider it to be a strength. While I am good at explaining the quotes and information that I use, I’m honestly horrible at integrating them into my writing. In my research paper, I tried my best to paraphrase wherever I could and let the evidence naturally flow into my sentences. I don’t think this is something I did well, but more writing in my own voice will help me fix that. I need to break the habit of strictly writing in the “claim, evidence, explanation” format, which is the way I was taught. Being able to structure my writing in my own way will allow me to discover my voice and writing style. This is something that I’ve been working on in the past and am still working on today. 

A skill that I improved on in this class is crafting an argument and supporting it throughout a paper. My literature review didn’t do this very well, and at the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t even very clear on what unique perspective I would be bringing to my topic. I focused on how my sources explained the properties of topological insulators, but didn’t really discuss how I would use that to support my particular angle. After reading through the guidelines and rubric for the research paper, I realized that this was something I had to do, so I made sure to focus on that. I added a section to my research paper outline titled “Future Directions for Research”, which discussed the future steps that could be taken to make topological insulators a part of our future technology. My two additional sources that I selected after the literature review were focused on that as well. 

For each of my writing pieces, I didn’t have a thorough revising and editing process. I’ve always hated drafting and revising, so the way I prefer to write is by creating extremely detailed outlines beforehand and then writing perfectly the first time. Of course, none of my writing is perfect, so revising and doing full read-throughs of my work would be beneficial. I could’ve (and should’ve) been doing this throughout the course, but I really didn’t do it much. 

My presentation hit on a lot of the course goals, mainly ones relating to understanding my audience and being able to create different formats of the same written work. My presentation was created with the audience in mind. I knew I was presenting to a group of college students of various science majors, so I knew I would have to explain certain terms (bulk, quantum Hall effect, etc.) but not others (conduction, electron, etc.). I explained the concepts that I knew would be unfamiliar in a way that would be understood by the class. Additionally, through my research paper and presentation, I showed that I knew what makes these formats different and how to execute each one effectively. 

Overall, I felt that my work in this class has been very productive. I believe that I have improved on a lot of things in these past few months. Although I’m taking another writing class in my time at CCNY, I will continue to write and use my experiences from this course to become a better writer.