Reflection/Thought Piece on Summary Essay

     Throughout the process of writing my summary essay, I came to realize how much communication mattered in my field of study. As a mechanical engineering major, I feel that verbal communication and one’s ideas can be difficult to interpret because of a lack of focus on explaining complexities to those outside of my major. By summarizing an article about communication in my field, I was better able to understand the text and relate to what the article was saying. I learned that research and writing take up more time in mechanical engineering classes than actually creating parts and doing calculations. I have begun to notice this more and more often during my second semester at Iowa State. For example, I spent five hours over the weekend researching ways to make 3D objects and shapes in SolidWorks, an AutoCAD 3D design software program, and I spent only an hour and a half actually making objects after I was finished researching. This showed me that the activities usually associated with engineering, like doing math calculations and creating 3D parts on the computer, only take a small portion of one’s time compared with activities that are less specific to engineering, like researching information and writing out reports and explanations.

     In addition to learning more about communication in mechanical engineering, I felt that the summary essay was relatively easy compared to past essay assignments that I completed in high school. With the summary essay, I felt that I was just paraphrasing and rewording much of the article while giving examples that illustrated the main points in the writing. In the past, I wrote a one page, single-spaced summary of a current event in AP US History every week, but it was more in-depth and it had to include the relationship between the current event and what I was currently studying in class. Throughout my other high school classes, I didn’t have the opportunity to write summary essays, as my AP Language teacher tried to avoid them by having students write many other types of research papers and rhetorical analyses. With a lack of experience writing summary essays, I think the most difficult part about writing the summary was keeping myself from adding my own opinion and elaborating on what the author of the article was talking about. For example, the author said that communication skills were becoming more important in engineering classes at many universities, and I wanted to add that many college freshman are seeing changes to the curriculum in their first few engineering classes – something I can attest to. However, this information didn’t appear in the article and so I had to omit my elaborative statement from my summary essay. The easiest part about writing the summary was that every single piece of information needed could be found in the article without having to research for additional facts or figures. Without having to research communication in mechanical engineering any further, I was able to complete the summary essay in a much shorter amount of time, while being more accurate with my statements since they all came from the same article.

     Overall, the summary essay was enjoyable to write, because it really helped me learn more about the importance of communication in mechanical engineering. I believe that the information I learned will extend outside of English 250 and it will help me understand how I can be a better student and a better engineer in the future.