Going into this ENGL 1A class I never had high hopes of a good grade and I was never a good writer. I would never had taken this class if it was not a requirement to transfer. During the first week of class, Professor Weidner gave us a brief outline of the course and what to expect from assignments. I thought this class was going to be the most stressful of all my classes as it requires lots of reading, writing and research and I never liked any of those 3 demands. However, as I am writing this I have approached the end of the course and I believe my writing skills have improved drastically and that I believe I can get an A in this course. 

The one constant about this class is the amount of reading I had to do. When we were voting for the class book, Lost Connections was only 5th on my vote because depression was never something that interests me. Professor Weidner makes us read approximately 60 pages over the weekend. Being a slow reader and hated reading, I believed it was too much. Despite that, I decided to put in the effort and read 8-10 pages a day while highlighting important quotations for my reading responses. In the end I actually enjoyed the book and even recommend it to my friends. Sometimes I felt that I could just read it for the rest of the day. Reading the books and texts along with picking out quotations improved my critical thinking skills of interpreting meanings of the texts.

Writing research papers have also been a new challenge in college. College research papers are so much different than what I was used to in high school. Research assignments at college level required citations which was something that I have never done before. This made me attend the tutoring sessions with Megan before class on Thursdays to learn about MLA citations which definitely helped me to get a better understanding about citations. In class I learned about the basic structure of a college research paper as it requires a thesis in the introduction to ‘setup’ the rest of the paper. I also learned about the TEAL paragraph format which was useful when writing arguments to support the main thesis of my research papers. I learned how to include quotes by giving credit to the author in my paper to avoid plagiarism. Professor Weidner also introduced many different genres of writing such as blog posts, op-eds and white papers. These genres all had a different audience and required different tone and language when writing. Throughout the semester, I have only been writing blog post genres as it is the genre I am most comfortable with. Because the final project required 2 or more different genres, this challenged myself to constantly adapt to a new style of writing different genres. As practice makes perfect, I now can write articles for different audiences and with a different tone in it. 

Writing these genres can be challenging but researching and picking a topic can be just as challenging. All this time, I thought that I just had to pick a topic, do some research and start writing about it. However this class has taught me that it is the incorrect way of doing it. The research process that I learned from this class was that I should pick a topic that is not too broad or narrow of a topic. Then I had to research articles whether there is enough information for me to write about it and expand or narrow your topic based on the amount of research you can find. The articles cannot be just any articles but the have to be scholarly articles which are written by recognized experts in their fields of study. The reliability of the website can be determined by the CRAAP test.

The new research process choosing a topic and researching was not easy because there could be so many ideas to talk about. I struggled to conduct research with this process as I got an incomplete for my first research paper. The paper required revision. I completed revisions by re-reading my paper to check for any plagiarism and restructuring my sentences to have a clear argument to support the main thesis. I also had to make sure that I have a clear and concise thesis at the beginning of the paper. By making these small changes, my paper was acceptable to college standards. 

For the future, I plan to take ENGL 1C next spring and transfer to UC. This class has definitely gave me the perfect foundation to succeed in spring as this class has taught me the structure of writing paragraphs in many genres of essays, how to cite good sources through the CRAAP test and the structure and requirements to write a college level essay and research paper. As for my career, I plan to major in Mechanical Engineering and writing is still required in my future career as I have to write reports very often. Lab reports requires me to write in a specific structure and this class and style of writing has also developed my writing skills to be organized and clearly structured. 

From having hopes of passing to now feeling like I can get an A. Overall, I believe I should get an A in this class because my writing skills before this course and now is virtually night and day. Another reason why I should get an A is because I have fulfilled every term in the grading contract to get an A. I have missed one minor reading response and I have completed all major coursework with 2 of them having done advanced work by posting my articles on medium.

The revision processes are very important to me as it allowed me to improve as a writer. I always had a highlighter or a pen with me when reading so I could make annotate the texts with the 4Ts and highlight important quotes or statistics. This allowed me to improve my critical thinking skills and ability to “read between the lines”. Writing reading responses was what allowed me to improve as a writer as it developed my reading and writing skills at the same time.

Picking topics for research papers was something I struggled with as I often do not know where to start as there are so many things I could talk about. The one session at Mt Sac Library where they taught me the research process of writing a college paper was very useful. I also asked my professor for help especially on my final project where I did mine about racism in sports. Professor Weidner was very helpful has me sent me links to Youtube videos and a whole pdf book about racism in sports to help get me started. 

I also had problems as I could not cite sources in texts without avoiding plagiarism. I solved this problem by attending tutoring sessions with Megan before classes on Thursday where she had a session talking about citing with the MLA format.

Overall, this class was not easy and I needed help from others along the way. I am thankful to everyone that helped me no matter how big or small of a contribution as they have made me become a better writer than I was in 4 months ago.

My teammates for the group project was Rodrigo and Edward. We may not have met face to face outside but we did create a Google doc and text each other about our ideas and exchanged quotes to be included in the paper. Rodrigo and Edward were both really helpful and managed to contribute to many ideas for our project. We managed to exchange our ideas complete our assignments that did not require revisions. 

I believe that this is a very important statistic because it means that we would be competing with robots instead of other humans for jobs. Robots are programmed to be more productive and cost efficient than humans which makes employers often choosing robots to automate the job instead of human labor. If the statistics are true, then humans will certainly have a jobless future.

Another reason why this statistic is so important is because it means we would have limited career choices. This is shown as there are certain jobs such as manufacturing contains jobs that are likely to be automated faster than white collar jobs such as doctors. This makes us as a new generation of people entering the work force having limited job options that would make us have that job in the long term.

Topic

Racism in sports

Research question

To raise awareness of how racism affects the sporting world and how it is not taken seriously.

Why you want to write on the topic?

         Racism is a way of discriminating against others because of their race. Minority races in countries are more likely to be racially abused. Being a sports fan myself and still playing a sport, I have seen many cases and forms of racism towards people of specific races. Sports should be a way of connecting and bring others together so no racism should exist. 

What genres you might use?

–          Blog post

–          Social media post

6 sources

1. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/football/racism-in-football-tammy-abraham-chris-hughton-spt-intl/index.html
2. https://globalsportmatters.com/culture/2018/12/12/in-an-ethnic-breakdown-of-sports-nba-takes-lead-for-most-diverse/
3. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2044405-racism-in-sports-comes-in-many-forms-must-be-fought-with-gestures-big-and-small
4. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170821085632.htm
5. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1766&context=student_scholarship
6. https://www.sportskeeda.com/football/87-of-france-s-world-cup-winning-team-are-immigrants-or-children-of-immigrants

Part A

With job automation, robots will take over many low skilled jobs leaving many people unemployed and unable to find jobs in the future because they lack the necessary skills. This will lead to a future where people will be without jobs due to job automation and we would have to figure out where to go from there. 

Part B

Main argument: With job automation leaving an increasing population unemployed, society needs to change in order for us to be happy in the future.

Quotations

“Economy needs to create tens of thousands of new jobs every month just to keep pace with population growth and prevent unemployment rates from rising even further.”

“About one-third of the U.S. labor force (53 million Americans) who provide these services are freelancers, that is, part-time workers without benefits.”

“Baldwin offers three-part advice: 1. avoid competing with A.I. and R.I.; 2. build skills in things only humans can do, in person; 3. “realize that humanity is an edge not a handicap.”

“Over the past decade, machine learning has progressed such that automated algorithms are already widely used for writing newsflashes, reports, and even novels; searching for precedential cases in law firms; diagnosing diseases; and even—strikingly—discovering laws of nature.”

“The task confronting every economy, particularly advanced economies, will likely be to retrain and redeploy tens of millions of midcareer, middle-age workers.”

Story/event

With the increase in technology robots are subject to job automation. Jobs that can be taken over by robots are often jobs that are predictable and require very little skills and qualifications. However, the modern age technology can develop robots that are capable to automate white-collar jobs such as doctors and businessmen. With this prospect, we will need to create solutions to keep our jobs. An issue with job automation is how will it change everything we know about society today and what our future would be like if we do have a jobless future?

There are plans that cars can be fully automated in the future. This quote suggests that whether the person behind the wheel of the car or the company manufacturing the car is responsible if there is an accident involving the self-driving car. There are further debates on any other kind of potential problems with the development of a self-driving car. The problems are such taking away businesses from car dealers, individual repair shops and gas stations. Overall, I believe with the improvement in technology to develop a self-driving car will reduce jobs and businesses in certain areas. However, in the future this may create new kinds of jobs in the future.

                The book also stated that there are plans to create self-driving taxis. I believe that self-driving taxis would create other problems. The problem is that it would create a question of who would own these cars and where it will be parked when there are no customers. Another problem is that some taxis will be shared which would allow new opportunities to commit crimes. Before the internet there was no such thing as cybercrimes or hacking. I believe that if there is a safe way to protect people in these self-driving taxis there will eventually be ways that people can ‘outsmart the technology’ and cause crimes by taking advantage of the technology.