Term Taken: 2020 Spring
Remote Teaching due to COVID19
Grading Scheme
- Resume writing (15%)
- Cover letter writing(20%)
- Business letter writing (25%)
- Mock individual interview (25%)
- Mock group interview (15%)
Review
This is the third and final English requirement for engineering majors.
The first part of the course was resume writing and business writing. It was very easy but I don’t think the marking scheme was fair. The teacher required us to “elaborate” on every points beneath a listing, however, I believe most of the companies prefer short and concise bullet points rather than long elaborations. Also, since most students had the experience of writing resume and cover letters, I think most of us simply modified old resumes and turned them in. So honestly I bet all students didn’t gain much from the first part.
The second part of the course was individual and group interview. It provided a chance for you to do a mock interview for a job you applied (that is, the cover letter and resume you wrote for in the first part), which was helpful in the sense that it made you more confident and prepared. However, since the teacher wasn’t that familiar with the engineering field, most of the questions were rather vague and general so it didn’t really resemble engineering interviews.
As for the group interview, a group of 4-5 students were thrown a topic (ours was “How to encourage more women in tech field”), and they discussed it for 12-15 minutes. It was just like the one done in ELTU1001, except the topic was always engineering-related. I always feel that group interviews are extremely awkward and are more favorable for pretentious people. Fortunately, all of the students in my group were pretty honest people, so we let every one take turn and speak for couple minutes to end the group interview torture smoothly. I don’t really think many engineering companies hire people based on group interviews, so I wouldn’t regard this assessment as super helpful for engineering students.
In conclusion, this was an ok course. We didn’t really learn much from the course, but we got the chance to keep up with our English skills.