Pengcheng Pei

Lynette Haberman

UWP 1

June 3, 2018

Reflection Memo

When my instructor introduced the assignment, I got confused about the primary research and

have no idea about how to analyze the discourse community. However, according to the

reading assigned by the teacher, Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys,

and Interviews written by Dana Lynn Driscoll and Discourse Community written by Gary

Schmidt and William Kopple helped my writing and offered me some ideas. In my first draft,

although I didn’t finish the whole essay and felt stressed about looking for sources, I pointed

out my first view that is communication in the discourse community of electrical engineering.

In my second draft, I finished the interview with an electrical engineering student who has

graduated from UC Davis. I added a lot of content for the research part. Moreover, I tried to

make some revision, since the weakness in my first draft is that I might not clearly illustrate

my primary research, and I might make a lot of claims that are not supported by sources.

Moreover, I pay too much attention to make the analysis about discourse community. In brief,

the beginning of the essay mainly introduces the relevant information about discourse

communities, and I mention several major points, which are communication, common goals,

writing styles, and interests.

Pengcheng Pei

Lynette Haberman

UWP 1

June 3, 2018

Word count: 1872

There are many discourse communities all over the world, and many of us are a member

of one or more discourse communities which we do not realize. Discourse communities have

a lot of similar definitions. Everyone in his or her life will be a part of a discourse community

at some moment of their life. According to the article Discourse Communities, Gary D.

Schmidt and William J. Vande Kopple illustrate that “in general terms, it is a group of people

who share ways to claim, organize, communicate, and evaluate meanings.” People have to

broadly agree a set of common public goals, and moreover, they will spend plenty of time on

sharing different ways to think and communicate about the same issues and things. In a

discourse community, the communication between its members is crucially important, since it

causes them to have shared knowledge and similar interests.

At university, a group of people sitting in the same classroom and lecture hall socialize

and share their personalities with each other. Students are more likely to start a

communication when the professor initializes a group discussion, which forms a specific

mechanism used to exchange information and ideas. Conveying information within groups of

people or communities serves several purposes. However, there exist a lot of students who

have no idea about majors and struggle to choose exact courses, for every major or discipline

is a discourse community and have their own uniqueness. Different discourse communities
have distinct interests and ways of communication. It is hard to determine what students

really want in their academic career. For me, I choose engineering of electrical major and

therefore can be identified with the engineering discourse community. This essay will focus

on whether groups of students who major in electrical engineering can be recognized as a

discourse community.

Unlike many other discourse communities, electrical engineers are unique in many ways.

In brief, electrical engineering is the branch of engineering that deals with the technology of

electricity. Electrical engineers work on a wide range of electrical components, devices and

systems. Moreover, there are various different disciplines that require the participants of

electrical engineering to not only conduct research but also to present the research at a

comprehensive manner, since electrical engineering is an area of study which is constantly

changing and improving. Today’s electrical engineering has grown and branched out a

number of new specialized categories, including power generation, motors, digital circuits,

control system, and etc. Members of the electrical engineering community need to keep up

with innovative novelties by using a number of mathematic models and other types of

algorithm.

One point displaying the electrical engineering is a unique discourse community is the

methodology of communication. In order to get comprehensive information about the

electrical engineering, I conducted an interview with my friend, Jason Lee, who is a graduate

student majoring in electrical engineering. In this interview, Jason provided me with many

detailed information about this major and the benefits brought by this discourse community.

According to the interview, students studying electrical engineering are required to take some
programming classes, including ECS30 and ENG6. In short, ECS30 is the class introducing

the basic programming and language C. ENG6 is a course that teaches students to use Matlab

to deal with engineering problems. Both classes use different platforms of communication to

discusses the academic problems and inform some crucial messages. The website Piazza.com

is a useful source to share information. Students post their questions regarding the content of

the class and assignments so that all of students and the instructor are able to give the answers

and views. In addition, some programing professors will provide another website called

Gradescope which is used to examine our homework. It is efficient for students to know the

correct answers and obtain instructors’ feedback. These two platforms offer students

opportunities of knowing a certain subject.

To know the exact way of communication among the electrical engineering students, one

of the questions is that “what the difference between is communicating with engineering

students and talks with other group of people in the academic field”. He replied that “many

students are more likely apply programming language into the writing and take full advantage

of acronym, so it is complex and confusing for those who have no knowledge about

programming.” The use of acronyms is predominant in this discourse community. For

instance, an electrical engineer can design an experiment or circuit described by

abbreviations that only engineers will comprehend it, and people of other professions will

hardly understand that. Unlike History as a discourse community, the use of detailed verbal

language in communication is infrequent. Through an examination of different designs that

serve as blueprints for projects, engineers can communicate easily regardless of the difference

in cultural background.
 When it comes to engineering design, students always need to be separated into several

groups and cooperate with each other. In the same group students probably have the

agreement which is to design the correct procedures of the experiment. As Peter Lloyd stated

in the Storytelling and the development of discourse in the engineering design process,

“engineering design is often perceived as a mainly technical activity yet within the

engineering design organization it really only coheres as a social activity” (Lloyd 357). Social

experience often appears to be a neglected area of study in the field of electrical engineering.

However, engineering design as a social activity always have the implicit influence.

According to Lloyd, the consequences is that a language is “invented” which allows a

description of the ongoing experience of that product and design process (Lloyd 370). Thus,

the reports of experiments and academic papers could be very different from other subjects’

papers.

In the field of electrical engineering, academic present data in the form of a report unlike

many other scholars in nonscientific fields. According to Move analysis of research articles

across five engineering fields: What they share and what they do not, while composing the

report, the engineer organizes information in accordance with the guidelines of the

profession. Students are trained to write reports that contain jargon such as equations, graphs,

and chart. The rule that engineers have include ensuring presentation of truthful information

in report writing. The majority of students seem to prefer this certain form of reports and

presentations, for they consider the form as the easiest to comprehend. Students majoring in

the electrical engineering need to be able to compare data and results to attain a conclusive

idea by understanding various forms of equations and abstract graphs. This mandatory ability
makes engineering students whose communication preferences are mainly factual, precise,

and concise. This is unlike students from many other academic discourse communities that

write reports containing massive amount of written data and elaborate language.

For instance, an engineering student prefers to deal with facts and structures the response

with short and simple sentences. According to the interview with my friend, he stated that

under the most circumstances, he often simplified his answers or drew some diagrams as the

explanation in the engineering courses. On the contrary, students who study history or

philosophy are good at answering some debatable problems and communicate their answers

into a lengthy analysis which is detailed and explains pertinent points. Therefore, it can be

noted that the electrical engineering discourse community is unique in the way of solving

problems.

In addition to the communication and the preference in the writing style, all electrical

engineering students have several common goals in the academic career. The majority of

them value their education that helps them solve problems with a strong logic and use their

knowledge to invent new technology. Tasks, challenging homework, and projects are made

by the professor to gain knowledge and experience for future career. Electrical engineering

students take the practically same classes. In the first two years at university, electrical

engineering students are required to take many basic courses, including physics, mathematics,

and programming. All classes help them prepare for more advanced education in the

engineering field. Although passing the class in order to move on to the next course is what

all students want to achieve, engineering students focus more on the ability to apply science,

mathematics, and design skills to solve engineering problems. To reach their goals, most of
electrical engineering students are will to sacrifice their time for improvement. According to

the interview with Jason, I was told that he used to spend a lot of time on figuring out the

complex questions and content of the class. There are many times that he had no choice but to

stay up all night to finish his work. Moreover, in the Perceived Stress among Engineering

Students, Lisa Schneider researches that “A regular weekday for Engineering students

involves an average of 11.1 hours spent on academic or paid work, with academic work

averaging10.5 hours and working for pay averaging 0.6 hours” (Schneider 2). It seems to be

the first task that electrical engineering students need to spend the large amount of time on

academic pursuits.

The majority of electrical engineering students are involved in some type of college

educational program or Engineering student organization, since they are more likely to have

the same interest. These common interests create bond between each member in the

community. In the interview, Jason shared his personal experience regarding group project.

When he was a junior student, he decided to join a programming activity and was assigned to

a random group. In order to finish a large programming project with others, the requirement

of the project is to design a small game, including interface, animation, sound effects. Heavy

workload from the programming project made Jason hardly get enough sleeping, but in

accordance with the project, he obtained something more valuable, friendships. During the

cooperation, he could learn a lot from the group members. As he said, “although different

people all around can be difficult to find similarities, once gathered together randomly, shared

goals and interests can be found among each other.” Indeed, the group members can share

thoughts and ideas through collaboration, which make the group work easier and more
interesting. Moreover, students in the group enjoy the sense of accomplishment after

completing a large project. It can be the motivation of every individual in the electrical

engineering discourse community.

All in all, electrical engineering students share many things in common. In the aspect of

communication, electrical engineering students get used to utilizing the abbreviation and

some certain websites to conduct social interaction. Also, based on their knowledge, electrical

engineering student prefer to form their own way of writing instead of using a lot of lengthy

analysis. In addition to these two point, students who major in the electrical engineering are

share common interests, goals, and hobbies and use communication to achieve certain

accomplishment. All examples and research given above show that electrical engineering

students are identified as a discourse community.

Works Cited

Lloyd, Peter. “Storytelling and the development of discourse in the engineering design

process.” Design studies, pp. 357-373.

Maswana, Sayako., Kanamaru, Toshiyuki. & Tajino, Akira. “Move analysis of research

articles across five engineering fields: What they share and what they do not”.

Ampersand, 2015, pp. 1-11.

Schmidt, Gary. & Kopple, William. “Discourse Community.”

Schneider, Lisa. “Perceived Stress among Engineering Students.”

https://www.asee.org/documents/sections/st-lawrence/2007/Schneider-2007-Student-

perceived-stress.pdf