Essay

End of Quarter Essay for mentors earning CMPSC 190J credit

The essay should be written in formal “school english”, except that you are permitted to use the first-person singular “I” (which is sometimes banned from formal writing, for whatever reason) to describe your individual contributions.

I suggest the following outline. You may deviate from this if doing so would better help you tell the story.

  1. Introduction

    In this section, write a paragraph or two that introduces the context of your CS190J experience. Describe CS56 in general terms, and describe the innovative aspects of the course that you were involved in (legacy code, github, code review). Provide just enough detail that someone unfamiliar with CS56 will be able to understand the rest of your writeup. The audience should be a CS faculty member or CS undergrad (a potential future moderator) that is not familiar with what we did in the course.

  2. Your Role in the Course

    Describe what you, specifically, did during the course. Help the reader understand the level of work involved, and the type of work involved so that you implicitly answer the question “why was this worth 4 units of upper division credit”?

  3. Your learning

    Describe what you, specifically, learned during the course. This could be technical learning, or it could be non-technical learning. It could be new skills/knowledge, or reinforcing existing skills/knowledge. Again, this is helps implicitly answer the question as to why this was worthy of 4 upper division units.

  4. Suggestions for future work

    What would you suggest are the learnings for the entire group?

    What about this quarter’s experience went well and should be continued?

    What suggestions do you have for what could be changed or improved for next time?

  5. (optional) If it helps the essay flow better to a conclusions, you can add a summary section at the end.

    If that seems superflous, because Section 4 ended on a good note already, you may omit this.

    You may also divide any of the sections above into multiple sections if that makes the story easier to tell. The outline above is a suggested guide, not a straightjacket.