Avisak Baishnab

English 21007

Writing for Engineers was one of the most expressive classes I have ever taken. I was able to express my ideas and my passion with engineering and further develop my creative mind. Throughout this course we had about five main assignments which are The Egg Assignment, Distant Waves Summary and Response, Brooklyn Bridge Paper, Persuasive Email and finally, The Lab Report. All of these assignments had targeted different aspects in both our writing and knowledge of engineering. Throughout this reflection, I will be talking about each of the assignments and my experiences with them. 

Our first assignment, The Egg, was a very interesting assignment for I had never interacted with an egg before. I am a pescatarian and do not consume eggs so when our professor brought in eggs for us to hold, I was surprised how it felt. I knew many things about the eggs like it’s nutritional value but I never knew how it felt and even how it tastes, well I still don’t know how it tastes. I really enjoyed this first assignment. It was really unique and granted me a new type of experience. We were meant to be descriptive with this assignment and this helped me further build my ability to describe something based on its looks. It also helped me to understand the idea that there is more meaning to something, even if it looks very simple and plain. With this assignment, I realized how important the egg truly is. I learned that the egg both gives life and produces life in ways I have yet to understand. Although eggs are simple looking, they are very complex and are often important for both animals and the environment. Throughout this assignment, I learned a lot from my peers as well. Whenever our professor would read someone else’s work, I always noted their grammar, vocabulary and way of writing and tried to improve and imbed them into my writing as well. This assignment in general was very engaging because it sounded like a very simple assignment, but turned out that there were so many complex ideas and facts. There are so many things you can talk about regarding the egg like its uses and how it’s produced. This was a great first assignment.

 Our second assignment, The Distant Waves Summary was a very interesting assignment because we were reading a few chapters from the professor’s own book “Distant Waves.” The professor also introduced us to Nikolai Tesla, an engineer who created the Tesla coil. We only read around 2 chapters of the book but it was very captivating. We were introduced to this family when suddenly an earthquake occurred. This very earthquake was made by Nikolai Tesla and one of his machines. This alone was very interesting because I have never heard of a machine making earthquakes let alone a human making earthquakes. Nikolai Tesla shows us how humans are able to create machines that are able to complete a wide range of actions. Up until this book, I have never heard of a human making an earthquake.  This assignment was very interesting because I learned a lot about Nikolai Tesla and what he did in the past. Up until this assignment, I have only heard of his name but did not know what he had accomplished during his lifetime. He is a great inspiration for up and coming engineers and his work is very interesting. With this assignment, I also had to think about what are the limitations of humans. As I had said before, I have never heard of a human capable of making earthquakes. I thought about this idea for while like what are our limits as humans. One of them is space exploration. We has humans can not live long enough for us to completely explore space. No only that we know too little about what is outside of our solar system. This assignment was very unique and informative. It helped me form questions and ideas I had not thought about before.

Brooklyn Bridge was our third assignment. This assignment was very intriguing because we were learning about something that most people have used once in New York City, The Brooklyn Bridge. Up until this assignment I didn’t know anything about the Brooklyn bridge like who planned it, how long it took to be made and how it was made. In today’s society we kind of just see these things and use these things without knowing its history and what was sacrificed for its creation. There were some amazing facts that I learned from this article like how someone had ridden across the cables of The Brooklyn Bridge and how even before the Brooklyn Bridge was made, people during the winter would ice skate over the East River in order to get to Brooklyn. It also makes you realize how different life was back then. With this paper, we were assigned to research a certain part of an article we had read. I decided to do research on the Caissons Disease, which is a sickness that people get when diving into water and rising to the surface too fast. When the Brooklyn Bridge was being made, Caissons Disease was very prevalent and was something that all workers, who went underwater, had to deal with. There are many symptoms of this disease like losing feelings in your body, ears popping, and feeling a lot of pressure on your body. This assignment brought up the idea of the dangers that can come with building large projects as well as health issues that people can deal with.

The Persuasive Email was the fourth assignment that we did. This assignment required a lot of imagination and creativity. This assignment was connected to our dream project, which the professor had us think about and build upon for a few weeks. I had settled on the idea of a Trans-Continental Railroad which would allow people to get from one continent to another via train. The purpose of this train was so that it would help reduce pollution and global warming. Although this project was very cool and unique, this would later come back to bite me in the last assignment. This assignment was fun because we had to make a scenario where we met a billion and we’d try to get them on board and support our project. We had to make an email in order to persuade this “billionaire” to join us on board with this project. We had to be professional and thy to get some sort of funding for our project. This assignment led to our last and final assignment, The Lab Report.

The Lab Report assignment was kind of difficult depending on your dream project. My dream project was called the Trans-Continental Railroad, which is supposed to be a railway system that allows people to travel across the continents. This project had many parts to it that I had not thought about yet. The railway system was meant to be electric and runs on renewable resources. This project was to allow people to travel around the world via train. It is supposed to be inexpensive so that the tickets don’t put a dent in the wallet of the travelers. With this assignment, we had to make some sort of lab report. I decided to do my lab report on different types of trains. The three trains were Passenger Trains, MTA Trains, and Bullet Trains. Throughout the lab report, I found that out of all of the trains the Bullet Train was the fastest and the most expensive train. This train also required more energy than the other two trains. This assignment helped me to work on my researching skills as well as develop the ability to turn ideas into a real thing.

In conclusion, this course has helped me to work on a wide range of skills like researching skills, creativity, and the ability to be very descriptive. To be honest, I did not thing that this course was going to go the way it went. I came into the class room with an expectation that was satisfied in a different way. I originally thought that we would be doing something with lab reports. Although we did do one lab report, I thought we would be doing more lab reports and learn how different they were in the engineering world. This course was very fun and enjoyable. I was able to develop and publish my skills.