on most work terms, students from engineering have to write a work report on a technical topic that they worked on over the term. the past term saw me write my last work report. hopefully, as it still had to pass the marking.

well, i handed my report in on the second day of classes, and for the first time in four tries, i passed the anal checklist portion without a resubmit on january 20th. now it was on to technical marking where the guy had two weeks to figure out if my report was actually an engineering report or a report to convince dumb executives to buy this or that.

the technical marking portion is the scary part, if you get a resubmit there you only have one chance to fix it up. if you don’t, you’re report is thrown away and you have to write a new one later. every term, i’m afraid my topic isn’t technical enough, and it gets harder after each report as the technical bar you have to pass gets higher.

anyways, by my calculations, two weeks after january 20th was february 3rd and i had not received any word by then. so i waited some more, maybe the marker was swamped with work reports (altho since i handed mine in a week before the deadline, i should have beaten the rush). another two weeks later, still no word. finally, one month after on march 4th, i received notice that my work report had passed. yay.

looking over the marking sheet, i was impressed that the marker thought that i had a lot of “low-level details and analysis to make it a good report“. on the other hand, i was irked by his commment:

Your writing needs a little work. The biggest annoyance is that you used both “filesystem” and “file system” in a seemingly random mix the first few pages, then settled on “filesystem” for the rest of the report.Also, some of what you have ended with a “.” are not complete sentences. Your spelling is good, but your grammar needs a bit of work.

i ended up getting a “slightly” on my writing & formatting (which is one above no). that sucks, it makes me seem like a chinese guy with no english skillz. but whatever, i passed so i don’t have to do anymore stupid work reports anymore.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: uwaterloo.ca, workreports