I know that I have not been posting any new journal entries.  The reason for this was because I had trouble with my time management because of the things to deal with from my other major classes and I had to help my family run errands since my home was being renovated over the last few months.  Anyways, the class this week so far was good.  Anyways, I am starting to adjust to doing some of his assignments.  The only part that I find most bothering me is that he did not post any feedback from our first assignment that we did.  We have just been doing the weekly discussion forums and responding to two other students’ responses to them.  I am a bit worried about our next assignment because we have to write our first draft of an engineering report regarding improvements on our object or mechanism that we picked.  Although the professor allowed us to write whatever we feel the most comfortable with, we still have to follow our coursebook instructions for writing a technical description report.  I believe the responses I got from the other students about my outline would help me a bit because they loved how I gave descriptions of what I would write in my piece and that the only thing I need to include was more description of what my object’s purpose is.  My report is about the Waze GPS system and how could I improve it.  The only set of issues I have with this assignment is that I have to be more specific when describing the analysis of how the evidence I found could support my ideas.  Maybe if I read more of the websites I found and posted in my outline and read the coursebook more, it would help me improve my writing skills further.  This would help me overcome my worries about not writing enough or not writing clearly.

The first two weeks have been unusual because I have never taken a course like this before where we do not meet up on either Blackboard Ultra or Zoom. But, I am starting to adjust to this no class meeting style of learning and have come to like it. I am kind of glad that we are not meeting in real person and instead doing assignments through blackboard discussion for this class. I just do the work that is supposed to be submitted on the same day and that is it. My favorite part about this class so far is actually the “Analysis of Article” assignment. He allowed us to write whatever we feel the most comfortable with. I actually found the perfect article to write about potholes. I know that the purpose of this assignment was to explain how the different literary elements are applied in this article. But I feel that this assignment was the first step in writing an actual engineering technical report. I also realized that this assignment was actually helping me improve on my analyzing skills. Getting better at analyzing is one of my major goals to accomplish in class.  Additionally, that first chapter in that technical textbook was really convincing of how engineers actually plan construction and solve society’s problems that would benefit everyone. I first thought that being a civil engineer was all about planning and that is it. But after being in this class so far and reading a part of that textbook, there were a lot more skills in being an engineer than just planning, it is just like doing a lab report.