The General Insights of The Life of a Brown Boy

Hi, my name is Tamim Uddin (pronounced: he/him). I’m a junior student at CCNY and am trying to get into mechanical engineering by that semester. About me: I was born and raised in Bangladesh, yet I have been living in New York, USA, for four years. Currently, I live in Jackson Heights, Queens. I love hanging out with friends, playing soccer (not at a professional level), going to the gym, and walking in my free time. This summer was a good chance for me to gain some muscles, but as the semester starts, I struggle with managing my passions and classes. Besides, I also love walking, and me and one of my close friends walked for hours without any specific destination, and it was a totally different experience. Also, I enjoy playing soccer, and this summer I played it several times with my friends (just for fun). Besides, I also play cricket, and I played for the high school cricket team (WC Bryant High School). However, I’m still exploring myself, and life has become much more complicated since 2018, when I arrived in the United States with my whole family. Later on, my life unexpectedly changed, and I had to suffer and sacrifice a lot in order to cope with education and overall adaptations, including mastering a new language. In addition, I’m multilingual: Bangla is my first language, and I can also speak and understand Hindi, Urdu (I need more practice in speaking to get fluency), and obviously English as well. As I mentioned earlier, I go to the gym, and the gym helps me a lot with so many things. Although I don’t have a six pack, I’m fit and healthy, and I view it more in terms of my mental health than my physical health. For example, every week going to the gym not only builds up a strong physique but also develops a hard work mentality and trains me to tolerate pain, which is really the most significant reason I always try to keep up with the gym; it’s my therapy. Specifically, I journal my days and often read some self-help books. Further, the three strong things that are the foundation of my discipline are exercise, journaling, and faith. Currently, I’m reading ‘Can’t Hurt Me’ by David Goggins. I will really recommend this book to anyone who wants to read it. In that book, I acknowledged how hard David Goggins life was. He had a horrific childhood, but he still fought against all his sufferings and became one of the toughest navy seals not only in the USA but in the entire world. I love this man, and reading his biography sort of helps me solve my own life problems. My life has been really tough for the last few years. I have been going through a really depressing time and have tried all possible ways to escape from it. Even though I fought back so hard, my third semester of college became a disaster and sort of risked my whole career. Moreover, I never give up. The next semester, I came back with a disciplined and trained mindset, regardless of all the obstacles I had, and passed the classes with good grades. Still, I’m fighting hard and keeping developing and training myself to be tougher and more disciplined. My biggest issue with writing is procrastination (I probably need to avoid perfectionism; I’m too afraid to start). Moreover, I’m a dreamer, and all of those dreams stop me from giving up and keep telling me, ‘Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me’. In the end, I really enjoyed recent classes, especially having some familiarity among other classmates and the passionate and optimistic teaching strategy of Prof. Bubrow, and I look forward to having a great and exciting semester with Prof. Adam and all the optimistic classmates in the class. — Tamim Uddin.

Mastering the Professional Writing: Navigating the Journey of Professional Writing

Writing is crucial in our day-to-day lives. From personal to professional, every aspect of life requires writing. Therefore, this course on writing for engineering has been designed to teach us some of the most useful professional writing methods. Through this class, I was able to learn plenty of writing strategies, including: Self-introduction writing, resume and cover letter, group proposal project, technical description, etc.

In the introductory paragraph, I wrote down an insightful self-introduction paragraph. This is where I talked about my education and my background. I’m from Bangladesh. Also, I’ve talked about my hobbies and passions: gym, soccer, and cricket. In addition, I talked about anything interesting about me—that I can walk a lot of distances. Through this, I’ve learned how to tell a story about myself.

This assignment is about creating a resume, cover letter, and job posting. For this assignment, I followed the resume format that Professor Bubrow taught us in class. Then, I put my name, education, skills, experiences, and all the qualifications into that. In addition, I also wrote down a cover letter that consisted of three paragraphs. Lastly, the job posting part was conducted. In order to do this, I first logged in to my LinkedIn profile and then figured out the job matching that matched my qualifications and career and highlighted the keywords that matched the skills I’ve acquired. After all, this was a really helpful assignment,though I had the opportunity to learn the very crucial skills of how to make a professional resume and cover letter, conduct research about jobs, and apply for the positions I appreciated.

Another important project that was conducted this semester was the lab report. This assignment was quite long and required a lot of necessary skills in writing, researching, probability, and coding. This assignment was about dice rolling and writing a lab report based on the experiment about the probability of the most-appearing sum. However, for my project, I wrote about finding the most-appearing sum of dice using a Google dice roller and a spreadsheet and followed the class instructions. After all, I learned another important skill of how to write a lab report, which is really necessary for me and other students in our academic and professional fields, including physics, sciences, and so many engineering courses that required that skill of writing a lab report based on the experiment followed by a certain organization.

The fourth assignment of this course is a group proposal assignment. It was an amazing assignment to be working on because I was able to learn something new with a combination of group hard work. For my assignment, I worked on the ‘Beaver Builders’ team with three of my other classmates: Ram Pachal, Richard Lopez, and Gavin Lee. Add to this, our project was about renovating the wingate to make a student center. Importantly, this assignment developed my ability to work and collaborate with groups, do professional-level research, PowerPoint, and develop writing skills. After all, I’m so grateful for being able to do that assignment properly, and I believe this will be beneficial for my career.

The fifth assignment was a technical description. This assignment was about making a presentation about any technology that is associated with my career. Therefore, I chose to write about the Falcon-9 rocket. The reason I’m so passionate about rockets is because this is the only vehicle to explore the outside of our atmosphere. Then, I presented it in class in front of the whole class with a brief overview of Falcon and the importance of this technology for our world. After all, I loved this assignment because it helped me to develop research skills about any technologies in order to learn, as well as sharpen my presentation, communication, and writing skills.

  This course has been a life-changing experience that has given me a wide range of professional writing abilities that are necessary for success in the engineering industry. Every task provided a different opportunity to learn, from creating an engaging self-introduction to grasping the nuances of writing a CV and cover letter. I was able to expand my skill set by studying technical descriptions, working in groups on projects, and writing thorough lab reports. In addition to improving my communication skills, I also refined my research, teamwork, and presentation abilities. Thinking back on this experience, I have no doubt that the skills I have gained will be extremely useful for my academic and professional endeavors in the future.