A Technical Disaster by Christopher

A Technical Disaster by Christopher - April 2019 Scholarship Essay

In my Technical Writing class, our final was a research paper that analyzed the merits of a topic of our choice, incorporated visuals that we created ourselves, and utilized the various organizational techniques we learned throughout the term. I chose to evaluate the benefits and detriments of robotic surgery compared to traditional open surgery. To give some context, this was a class that I was struggling in already at the point of this assignment; the stakes were high since my cumulative GPA hinged on the outcome of this paper. Even with that in mind, though, I didn’t imagine that it could possibly be the nightmare that it turned out to be when I was given this assignment.

Now, I’m not one who typically procrastinates on assignments, but this paper was so difficult that I simply dreaded working on it. I think the reason I struggled it so much was because the topic was completely foreign to me so it felt like I had to learn an entire sub-field just to write this one paper. That coupled with the facts that 1) I failed to organize the various sources effectively in my notes and 2) my topic was a little too broad resulted in a double whammy of sorts that killed my productivity.

We had two weeks to work on the assignment so I worked on it a little bit everyday. However, it seems that I didn’t do enough because come the day before the assignment was due I still wasn’t done. Long story short, I ended up staying awake ‘till 2:00 AM to finish the assignment. Thankfully, my efforts paid off when I learned that I had gotten an A in the class by a margin of a mere three points (!). In short, I was able to overcome this struggle by not completely procrastinating in the first place and then staying up late to get it done.

From my experience in my Technical Writing class, I learned something very valuable: just because I give my best effort on an assignment doesn’t mean that I will get the outcome I want. This was a notable wake-up call for me because it was my first dosage of what college is really like. In essence, I ended up struggling with this assignment because I failed to adequately plan beforehand, ask for the help when I needed it, and just didn’t have the proper skill set in general, ultimately resulting in a welcome dose of humility.