I am writing this reflection having presented the poster and presentation today, with only the final draft of the technical report left (and the rest of my e-portfolio). So far, my group and I have made great strides towards completing the coursework for this class. Yesterday, we met up on campus and practised the presentation repetitively for hours, making adjustments to our oral content and the presentation's alike, until we were all satisfied with the result. Although I believe our nerves got the best of us today, as the last group to go, I am happy that this is done with and past us (my hands were shaking the entire time). The poster got many positive reviews, with industry professionals and faculty members coming to discuss our idea in more detail, which is a positive indicator after we received close to zero questions in the presentations. They offered insight on the legislation and regulations in Qatar, something which we will be sure to mention in the technical report as it give a multi-perspective view on our work, and also questioned some details, answered during the conversation and will for sure be added in the report, too. I wasn't;t feeling confident about the report at first, as we were going in completely blind, but Dr. Naqaa's comments along with the project brief (which we now thankfully have on hand) have rejuvenated my desire to finish the project in high quality and exceeding standards. Our future plans also include a DWC visit this week, to go over the report, so my fingers are crossed in regards to our performance.
Overall, this course has been an experience. With alternating periods of doing nothing then doing everything, I feel like I could have managed my personal time better to alleviate some pressure during stressful times. Nevertheless, I am proud because I feel like I've done my due diligence towards my group, making sure to stay on top of things and never miss a deadline (despite missing a week of university). Although my procrastination problem persists, my collaborative and communicative skills have improved, with zero fights or conflicts throughout the entire semester. I also feel like my technical writing has gotten better, which is an understatement considering I knew nothing of it prior to the course. For the future, I would like to take other roles within any group I work in, the managerial one is too taxing. I just hope our efforts are rewarded, on both the tangible level (grades) and the abstract one (soft skills).
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Week 15 was exciting, although I was absent for most of it. We finalised and submitted our poster, a task I was especially cheerful about, as it felt like the pinnacle of the course (never mind that the presentation and report weren't done yet). We also submitted our third and final memo and met with Dr. Naqaa to go over everything so far, in an effort to guide the poster, presentation and technical report in the right direction. The talk about the transition from the problem statement to the technical report was especially helpful, considering the the former is basically incorporated into the latter, but keeping in mind the difference in audience (engineers) and purpose (call to action). As a group, we re-contextualized the problem to a real-life situation to make it more relatable and relevant, which in this case was the blockade imposed on Qatar. We were also advised by Dr. Naqaa to create a narrative in the presentation, to turn our work into story format in an effort to capture interest and maintain it. One more change we made was the decision matrix deciding on the solution, which in hindsight, was in a quite confusing format in the third memo. Even I lost track of how to read it, with the unnecessary weight and mislabeling of the average. We have (thankfully) revised this, and I like to think that the decision matrix in the technical report is at least more legible, although less colourful.
Weeks 12-14 started quite slow, but picked up speed at an exponential rate, and deadlines were upon me in the blink of an eye. I distinctly remember our first topic of discussion being ChatGPT. Personally, I detest ChatGPT. I was naive at first to its effect, simply thinking that everyone's quality writing improved a lot recently, and was honestly happy. Ignorance is bliss, as they say, but this false reality was quickly discarded in favour of a bleaker outlook of life: people are losing the ability to think for themselves. Don't get me wrong, I think ChatGPT is an excellent source for organising your content, independent learning, or even viewing examples, but many have started using for idea generation and development, which considering that the AI uses machine learning and a database of works by other people, strikes some pretty controversial questions on the ethics of using it in this way. This tied into our English class when we conducted an experiment: with Project 3 approaching, and the need for cover letters, we wanted to see if the AI can write an effective cover letter for a specific job advertisement using our resume. I struggled with ChatGPT, feeding it both the job ad and my resume multiple times, regenerating responses again in again, because everything that was produced sounded inauthentic. It was like the tool was simply filling in gaps with no consideration to the actual content of the task, which is to be expected of artificial intelligence. Further discussion in class indicated that I was not alone in my problem, and the general conclusion was that while it could provide some basis for the text, it cannot replace human writing, with both its implications and imperfections. We moved on to presenting our posters, of which I had the main responsibility. To be honest, the poster structure came to me in a dream when I was napping in the afternoon. I started directly planning it out with input from my team, but we did not really pay attention to the captions we wrote, electing to focus on the big picture for our first draft. We had a mini-poster preview in class, on which Dr. Naqaa commented that there needs to be less text and clearer organisation. We also had the opportunity to view the presentations and posters of the other ENGL-210 class, from which I learned a lot. Most questions seemed to be directed at their decision matrices, meaning that if nothing else, our group had to get that right. Organisation and time distribution seemed to be important too, with many groups focusing on the problem rather than the solution. To make my learning my concrete, I filled in a presentation review form for one of the presenting groups (which was my completely subjective opinion), which also helped me narrow down our foci for our own presentation as a group. Empty line for scribd pdf.
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