Abstract: I have been researching myself to give me a better understanding of myself as a writer. School and current life circumstances have given me the knowledge and experiences to learn and prosper. I gathered information based of what I have done or acheive over the semester. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both of these question will help  me identify my strengths and weaknesses on writing. The self-assessment essay focused on this semester of writing for the sciences. It reflected upon how my writing style has improved overall and how this class was beneficial to my overall development as a writer. It compares papers written throughout the semester.

My name is Irin Bristy. I am a sophomore at The City College of New York. I am currently a Biology major. For my future aspirations, I wish to become a doctor, as through this profession, I will be able to aid and help many people who doesn’t get medication attention because of their economic instability , as well as keep them healthy. In order to do this, one of the classes that I’m required to take is Writing for the Sciences.  For this class, we worked on our writing skills as well as researching skills in order to write scientific based papers. This digital portfolio is a compilation of all the work I’ve done throughout the semester. Since English is my second language, I hoped to improve the ability of my writing skills, as well as having proper structure to my essay, before, coming into this class. I enjoyed the fact that we focused on the structural aspect of writing essays and writing thesis statements. One thing I did not expect was that we have to do group presentations at the end of the semester. Now that the semester is over, I am more confident in my writing skills than before. I can express my thoughts easier through writing. I have also become better at researching information and finding credible sources from our proposal and research projects. However, I still have to work hard to perfect my grammar skills and writing style. Also, while doing the presentation I felt I’m still weak in public speaking. I still hope to improve this skill as I continue on with college.

Self Assessment

Introduction Letter

The first assignment from this class was an introduction letter. It was one of the easiest assignments of this semester. It was mostly writing about myself and my future aspirations that I have. Writing this introduction letter reminded me of what motivated me to choose doctor as my proficient which was related with what I have experienced in my life and why I wanted to go into science in the first place. In addition, while re reading the introduction letter with having comments on it, I realized that I have some issue with organize my paper. However, I wasn’t as confident of my writing skills and I wished to improve this skills throughout the semester. At this point, I feel that I have done a good job writing introduction letter. Finally, I enjoyed writing this paper.

3 Times Summary and responses

I found this assignment to be interesting. For this paper, I had to look for a New York Times Article related to science, and respond to the article we choose. What I enjoyed about this assignment was that I was able to pick an article of my choice related to science, which had me more interested in the assignment. The article I chose to do was based on science and health. It was an interesting assignment for me due to the reason that I haven’t done this type of assignment before. Through this assignment, I was able to use news articles for my research. Another thing I liked about this assignment that it allows me to learn about current events going on in the world related to science, and I was able to learn something new. I also had to respond to what we have read, incorporating our own thoughts and feelings while reading this article which allows me to think deeply about the articles and the topic itself.

Science Controversy Paper

I found this assignment to be more harder than the rest of the assignment I have on this course. With this assignment, I had to choose a controversial topic to inform the reader about,  without being biased and taking a side to a certain issue. This was a struggle for me as I am more used to writing argument essays, where I do take a specific side for a certain issue. First, I had to write two annotated bibliographies based on the topic I choose for this assignment. This helped me to gain more knowledge about the topic and organize what I want to talk about in the paper. For my first draft, I struggled choosing a middle position and write about “right of an unborn child vs abortion right” where I had to write about whether women has right of bodily autonomy or unborn child has right to life, without having my opinions involved.

After completing this assignment, I wasn’t feeling much confidence due to the middle position that I have took to discuss about the controversy. But, I was able to provide enough evidence to support my claim and being able to describe it. I also had some grammar error and organization issue with this assignment due to the reason that I didn’t spend much time on it. However, this assignment helped me look at both sides of the argument and understand different viewpoints which making it a controversial issue. To sum up, even though this assignment was difficult for me and couldn’t do well on it, I felt that it gave me a better understanding of the topic.

Technical Description

For this assignment, I had to write a description of an object, mechanism, or process. It doesn’t necessarily have to be entirely scientific. However, it has to be about how something works and need to have enough details to make the reader understand about the object.

This was also an interesting assignment to me where I choose to write about stethoscope. I always wonder about how stethoscope works when I was little. So, this assignment  allows me to fully understand about how it works and the process of it. Therefore, I enjoyed researching this topic as well as writing about it. I had to describe how each parts works and add images of each parts to make it visually clear to the reader. I also had to write about process description of stethoscope to tell the reader how it functions. After completing this assignment, I felt confident on achieving my goal on writing.

Collaborative Research Project and Presentation

This was the final assignment for this class and it was a group research project where we had to present our research to our classmates and professor. As a group we had to work together and research on the topic. We choose to divide work among group members and we each had different parts to research on and had to write about it.

The science proposal was helpful for many reasons. One reason being that it helped us organize what we wanted to talk about for our group presentation. The proposal was broken down into purpose, summary, introduction, policy, proposal and conclusion. My job was to do the introduction part and I feel pretty confident that I had a successful thesis statement and had enough information to address my research to the readers. After done writing the science proposal paper, we started working on our slides for presentation. We each had different slides to do and we all had to present in front of everybody. This is where I got mostly nervous because English is not my first language. But, I am happy that I overcome the obstacle. However, I enjoyed doing this research project with my other group members.

Overall, this class improved my writing skills, , whether it was writing a successful thesis statement, having flow and structure throughout my essay, accurate evidence to support my points. I hope, what I have learned throughout the semester will improve my overall writing skills in future.