Final Reflection

Professor Gallagher,

This semester I have learned a lot about both W.O.V.E communication and myself as a communicator. These skills will be very valuable in my upcoming future as a scientist, because presenting and sharing my data and experimental findings is one of the most important things scientists do. Without sharing data and letting others replicate experiments, the work done is essentially useless. My strengths I have developed this semester as an oral and visual commutator will help me in the future, but as I grow and learn as a scientist, I hope to continue to further develop these skills as well.

Next semester I am planning on growing my W.O.V.E. communication skills by taking English 312, and advanced biological based English class. In this class I plan to improve my visual skills by learning the best ways to visually organize presentations that best reach the audience. I also plan to improve aspects of my communication that I do not do so well at. I would love to work on my technical writing skills in order to be able to exactly convey what I am doing in an experiment to other scientists, to allow them to easily follow and replicate the experiment. I would also like to improve upon my electronic communication, because I find myself coming across as awkward at times when I am corresponding to professors through e-mail.

Outside of the classroom, I would also like to get better at my delivery and organization of my writing. Often when I am writing—or typing—my brain starts going faster than my hands and my delivery often gets jumbled up and disordered. I think that this problem also brings up my weakness of organization. If I work on pre-planning and organizing my essay before I start writing it, I may not have all these splattered ideas rushing out of my brain and vanishing into thin air. Before I start an essay I need to get better at gathering information about the subject I am writing and creating an outline, or a brainstorming page that allows my brain to spit out ideas. After I have done this I need to take those ideas and come up with a concrete plan for writing the essay. I believe that by doing these steps, my writing will become clearer to my audience.

I believe that the last aspect I need to work on as a writer is reviewing my paper before I submit them. I have gotten in a bad habit over the last few years to submit things before fully reviewing them, limiting the quality of my work. This simple task of taking the time to review and make changes to my document could immensity improve my writing, and also help me avoid stupid mistakes and points being docked off.

By making the changes I talked about above, I can continue to improve my communication skills. Improving my communication skills will help me excel both in the classroom and out in the real world, and hopefully take me to places I have only dreamed about going. Through both guidance from my instructor next semester, and work I put in on my own, I hope to work towards these changes. This semester is only a small stepping stone into my future as a communicator and I can’t wait to see how I continue to grow in the future.

Thanks for the semester,

Kaitlin Burdick