Letter of Introduction

Welcome to my academic portfolio for the Fall semester of 2022. Here I will display all of my works from my Freshman Composition class during the fall. This year I have learned the importance of the audience. Writing in high school, I was only writing for my teacher or a person that was already pre-determined for me. However, this class has taught me to think about my audience. This has completely changed the way that I write, because now I am not concerned about sounding sophisticated for a better grade, but I am more concerned about whether my style of writing will suit the kind of audience that I am trying to appeal to. Genre is another important rhetoric device that I have learned. Genre is a way for me to deliver my message to my audience in the most effective way possible. I cannot talk about stopping Asian hate crimes through a memo to my four co-workers. Something like a personal essay piece or a potential letter to a congresswoman are effective mediums to get the message across. Engaging in the collaboration such as peer reviews were also something that I found to be effective. Some of my classmates that helped with the review were the exact kind of audience that I was attempting to appeal to, so when they give me feedback on my writing, it allows me to have a look into what my audience thinks of my work. The peer review meant a lot to how I was able to approach my writings since I was now able to see an example of how my audience would react to my work. Locating research sources in our library database was an effective skill I have learned throughout the course as well. Finding credible sources on the internet nowadays is hard considering most of the results that come up are based on the popularity of the source, which can lead to major bias. Learning how to locate academic journals was also a very important skill. I am sure that even though I am on the engineering track, that I will be taking a few more writing classes and as an aspiring engineer, I need to be able to read academic journal articles in order to further broaden my knowledge of computer science. All these skills were meaningful to me because these are skills I will utilize for the rest of my life. I will always consider my audience when I am writing or talking about a certain topic that I am interested in, I will always try to include my peers in the review process of my works, and I now have a new understanding of pinpointing the biases in articles that I read everyday and I now have a basic understanding of how academic journal articles are written, something that I have no doubt will help me in my career of computer science.

Bio:

I am an 18 year old, Korean-American boy. I grew up in Bayside Queens and lived there my whole life. I grew up with two older sisters named Yubin and Yura, my mother, and father. On the first day of third grade, 09/06/2012, my father passed away and left me the “man” of the house. In this I picked up on martial arts, if I could not help my mother make money, I thought that I can at least protect them physically. I earned my first degree black belt in Tae Kwon Doe a year later and started MMA, which is a hobby to this day. I have always been interested in math, science, and especially history. History, specifically around the time of World War II, always interested me because my mother would always tell me stories about war heroes.

I currently am majoring in Computer Science at the City College of New York. I hope that I can learn about cyber security due to the rampant rise of online hacking and DDOS attacks that leave our information open for the world to see. This year in my Freshman Composition class, I talked extensively about the #stopasianhate movement. This is something that I have felt passionate about since the start of COVID-19. Seeing elderly Asian people being abused on the streets for something that they did not do and reminiscing of my father and his experiences with racism and what he taught me. I am glad to have taken this class, because I feel that it allowed to me to be more in touch with who I am and this class has also helped me with my ability to express my opinions through research and learning of literary genres.