Reflection Essay: Building Skills Through Coursework and Experience

During this course, I have gained valuable skills and tools that will guide me in the world. Each assignment provided me with an opportunity to improve in different areas, enhancing my skills and knowledge in various areas. While this is a writing course, I found that I learned much more than just grammar. I acquired skills during every assignment, writing a group proposal, lab report, and even a professional resume and cover letter. Through these assignments, I have developed a deeper understanding of the importance of clear communication, collaboration, and effective high-level research. 

Receiving and completing this assignment of making a resume and cover letter has thought me many things. I learned everything from what exactly is a resume and cover letter, to how to build and proper one specifically structured to my wanted job. I was thought how to match my resume and cover letter to a job description using keywords. As well as how to build myself up by not only putting my skills on my resume but my qualities too. I learned to take these qualities that a company is looking for in this job posting and apply and showcase my relative qualities, in my job application. I got a proper resume and cover letter out of this assignment as well as the knowledge and information on how a job hiring works, and how to apply properly, and for that, I’m truly grateful.

Reflecting on my lab report assignment, I can say that it was a great opportunity to practice and enhance several essential skills, including my synthesis, research, citation, and writing clarity skills. The assignment required me to conduct primary scholarly research and effectively synthesize the information gathered from other lab reports and my research while organizing it in a way that was clear and easy to understand for my audience. Additionally, I had to follow APA citation style, which taught me how to properly credit the sources I used in my writing. Moreover, I learned the importance of proofreading and editing and seeking feedback from peers and instructors to improve my work quality. Furthermore, the assignment helped me develop proficiency in reading as well as online data gathering. As I read many scholarly articles and lab reports and then organized them into clear graphs and tables, which covered the course objective of the use of technology and reading. I also gained a clear understanding of what an appendix is and effectively utilized my knowledge to add additional information that I had gathered through my research. 

Regarding our group proposal project, it was an excellent and enjoyable experience to collaborate with my peers and apply the knowledge and skills we learned in class to a real-world problem. Through this assignment, I learned the importance of communication and organization when working with a group, as we worked together splitting the work fairly between each one’s strengths. It also allowed me to improve my drafting and revision skills by working on multiple drafts of the proposal and in each one taking into concertation my team member’s feedback. Additionally, the assignment helped me improve my public speaking abilities. Although I had taken a public speaking course last semester, I had not yet had the opportunity to showcase and enhance my skills in front of a large audience until this assignment.

Overall, this course has been a great, useful learning experience for me. I have gained valuable knowledge and skills that will help me in my academic and professional journey (the world.) Throughout the assignments, which ranged from group proposals to lab reports and creating a professional resume and cover letter, I not only improved my grammar but also developed a deeper understanding of the significance of clear communication, collaboration, and effective high-level research.