Self-Reflection Week 2

Written on 9.27.2025

1. What gaps do you think exist between your expectations and those of your professors?​
2. How will you try to bridge those gaps in the weeks ahead?​
3. How will active reading strategies improve English communication with professors?​
4. How has reading about engineering thinking changed how you think about the way you should study for Engineering classes?​

This is my second week in university, and I gradually got used to the life here. From my point of view, there is not a big gap between my and my professors’ expectations. We all expect ourselves, students, to learn knowledge and find our interests. A slight difference may lie in the class performance, where professors expect us to be a little more active and ask questions. But I expect myself to listen to professors attentively because the content of the class is a little bit different from high school. But in two weeks of study, I understood that being active and interacting with the professors and my classmates are also a way of enhancing my communication skills and improve my English ability, especially in English classes. So, in the future, I will try to jump out of my comfort zone and become more active in classes.

I think active reading strategies will allow me to have a better understanding of the text so that I can better exchange my ideas with the professors.

Lastly, my reading about engineering so far has helped me better understand what goals an excellent engineer should aim at. In the “Systems thinking & Design thinking”, I learned that an excellent engineer should not only focus on the product itself, but also should he focus on the users’ experience, which I usually ignore. So, when studying for Engineering classes, I should not only receive the knowledge plainly but also think more about in what ways the knowledge can be applied to. By this active way of learning, hopefully I could become an engineer designing “thoughtful” products.