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Portrait of Parsa Abbasian, smiling, wearing glasses and a sage green t-shirt against a teal studio background

02Reflection · 30%

On the course, and on myself

Part A: experience in ENG 2003 (250+ words). Part B: growth as a communicator (250+ words). Total length 500–1,000 words. Both draw on the axioms of communication and the 7 C's.

Reflection rubric

Part A

  • Overall experience in ENG 2003
  • Whether the course matched expectations
  • Most useful course content
  • Most interesting topic
  • Axioms of communication
  • 7 C's of Communication

Part B

  • Communication skills before and after ENG 2003
  • Skills improved the most
  • Skills still needing work
  • Impact on other courses and engineering practice
  • Axioms of communication
  • 7 C's of Communication

Part A: Reflecting on ENG2003

Written against the axioms of communication from Lecture 04 and the 7 C's of Communication.

ENG2003 over the summer was an endurance event. Monday lectures went from 6:30 pm to 8:20 pm, with tutorials on Wednesdays, and I would attend them after a long day doing shipping for Undercut and UniSpot on one hand and organizing GDG on Campus's first flagship event at the Toronto HQ of Google on the other. Going back and forth between code reviews and event briefs on the same day was tiring, but not only that – it was practicing Axiom 4, where it becomes clear how contextual communication is, and a sentence means different things in a sponsor email vs. in a scraper README. Tutorials were engaging in that sense because they remained practical.

Grammar rules, formatting templates, and surface correctness were something that I anticipated in this course. ENG2003 proved to be much more than that. Communication proved to be audience psychology and structure instead of syntax alone – in other words, Axiom 8 in practice. It became clear to me from Assignment 3 – creating two brochures about the same cancer-detection research for high school and university STEM audiences respectively. Same evidence, different framing. While the general audience brochure used the example of learning the difference between cat and dog in order to explain what convolutional neural networks are, the STEM one talked about Vision Transformers, radiogenomic fusion, and inter-observer agreement at κ ~0.6–0.8.

The lecture material that I will find useful the most will be from Lecture 06 – plain-language editing. Here, the 7 C's were finally tangible tools to use instead of vague concepts. Conciseness and Clarity through structured cuts; Correctness through proofreading that finds errors that spellcheck cannot – that's why the "Slay the Demon" activity was so useful in demonstrating the latter point.

Persuasive communication became the topic that I liked the most. To know that the YOLO model can be deployed at the edge of the network is not the same thing as making a non-technical stakeholder care. And that is exactly what Axiom 5 is about – communication as influence. Without Credibility, however, the former is nothing but salesmanship, which is why the limitation section accompanies the results in my technical report.

Not everything landed. The flipped pre-lecture content was often valuable in concept and costly in practice: mandatory modules after a GDG planning block or a long dev day felt like friction, not acceleration. Axiom 3 applies once you click submit — communication is irreversible — and a rushed pre-lecture note cannot be unsent.

Part B: Growth and Development as a Communicator

On what improved, what still needs work, and what I will do differently.

I have been code-first since before I even knew it. Whenever there seemed to be logic on its side, I took the value of that logic for granted. I repeatedly failed when attempting to explain the concurrent Go scrapers working in Undercut or the WebSocket synchronization used in UniSpot. It was no different in my position as the Class Representative of MATH 1013 and PHYS 1801. Transforming an entire feedback session of students into an action item for the instructors turned out to be more challenging than I thought. Same mistake as the GDG Operations Lead, who has a brief for speakers that made sense to me, yet was lost when sent to an attendee that skipped all the planning sessions. Mistakenly treating communication as the act of transmitting information, while it actually is an interaction of people (Axiom 1).

By far the most improved ability is audience adaptation. This became clear from the brochures project. Similar principles applied to Term Project 1, whose executive summary targets those who will only read the first page. By the end of the term, the 7 C's became a checklist: clarity and conciseness in editing, correctness in proofreading, completeness in the structure, coherence in transitions, concreteness when praise was too vague, courtesy in feedback, and credibility when discussing the limitations.

Reading peer reviews of the technical report gave me a whole new perspective. Three classmates gave my draft 14, 15, and 14 out of 16 points. Peer 1 mentioned a problem of sentence density, lack of coherence in section 4.3, and FDA figures in Table 1 that had been placed inappropriately for them to compare with other data - a miniature of Axiom 7: there was nothing wrong, but the layout suggested otherwise. Peer 3 was generous with just 5 words: "Good Technical Report overall." The difference was instructive in terms of Axiom 2: every message is not only about content, but also about relations.

The assignment that posed me the most discomfort is assignment 1 — the cover letter. According to axiom 6, communication implies interpersonal risks. In one page, I needed to demonstrate credibility, relate UniSpot and Undercut to a job offer, and make a clear request. There was no way out through an appendix with a general phrase. This assignment was accompanied by the absence of an article and an ambiguous closing phrase despite the proofreading exercises on other people's text where Correctness was named among other gaps. The cover letter PDF is showcased on the portfolio Showcase page.

I am still having difficulties with Conciseness. Weeks of work on the pipeline, leaving the "how" while the reader needs "what" and "why" imply some kind of secrecy, which is against all my instincts. Peer 1 pointed it out; I rewrote those sections; and I have not managed to overcome this yet. Correctness under time pressure is the second gap. Finding mistakes in my own work is more difficult than finding them in the class handout.

This will change my future approach to engineering classes and projects. GDG event recaps will begin from results before any details about the process. The speaker briefs will include what should be learned by the audience before the schedule. If I need to explain Undercut or UniSpot, I start with problems of the user. Documentation is written so a sponsor, volunteer, or teammate who missed every planning call can still act on it.