I'm Ren Lowe, I'm a third year of BioSci major. My name is Thao. I am a fourth year student at UCI. I'm majoring in international studies and public health policy. My name is Duncan Chung. I'm a fourth year right now and I study aerospace engineering. Hi, I'm Angela. I'm a second year of Bus Admin major at UCI. I'm Louisa. I'm a fourth year, political science major and urban planning and public policy minors. Hello, my name is Matthew. I am a fourth year student at UCI. I'm studying business administration with an emphasis in marketing and operations and management. I guess one thing about me, I'm actually getting ready to graduate in about a week or so. Time is ticking, but I'm excited. There's the lower division university-wide requirements and then the upper division one usually, it geared towards your specific major. I know that certain biology students take a specific biology like writing course. For engineering, they have one too and it's geared towards that field and the types of research papers that you would write in that field. A lot of my papers have to do with analyzing policy proposals. Those are more like evidence-based, you have to draw from specific research and know how to cite specific research. We were doing a grant proposal for the class. That was very interesting because we were doing a policy analysis and then we have to pick a topic, like a policy that we want to analyze and change. We picked a research related to that policy and then what we're going to improve on that research. Then we'd write a grant proposal to get grant to do that research that we were going to improve on. The lab reports. It would mostly consist of data that you get out of the experiments or from understanding the concepts you learned in class. I think definitely, shorter writing assignments. Being a business major, most of our writing assignments are not going to be long research papers that you might expect in a different major. But for example, we write a lot of short, maybe 1-2 page write-ups on a case, where we're doing a case study type write-up, or we're doing a business memo, where we're practicing writing in a professional business manner, getting the point across as quick as possible and then supporting that point in a concise manner. I have taken my upper division scientific writing and I've taken the research lower division writing as well. They're both pretty different, but we'll start with the lower division writing, which is probably the more challenging of the two I've taken, which focused on research and argument. When you're doing a research project like that in writing, you have to some degree be an expert at what you're writing at. Grammar definitely it's still important because that's going to help you get your point across clearly and make your argument to the professor. But what they're mainly focused on is the content of your paper. What is your argument? What is your thesis? Are you supporting your thesis well? Are you making your argument clearly? Is the evidence that you're using to support it, are you using that clearly? Is it the right evidence? They're definitely still more focused on the content of your paper and how you're arguing it and how you supporting it. I guess this is a very important and I feel like unique thing to college compared to high school, is that a lot of papers are actually graded by TAs or class readers rather than the professors themselves, especially, earlier and larger GE classes. Sometimes there's a reader for a class and they don't necessarily attend or host class or host discussions, but they've taken the course before and they've been pre-approved by the professor to read essays. Since the ones I've taken our GE classes, yeah. For sure, do it based on how a good TA grades, because every TA will grade differently. Your TAs are generally your discussion leaders as well. I would probably say to over research, if that is even a thing. That's where I think 60-70 percent of your work should be going into research of the topic and also diversifying your sources, and also take advantage of the writing resources that UCI has to offer. The library is an extremely important resource, and there are a lot of staff in the library who are experts at research, it's what they're there to do, so they can help you. I think the biggest issue with research papers that people have is time. Sometimes you might get lucky and spend 10 minutes and find everything you need. But there are times when things are really hard and you might spend hours but not find anything that you can use. Starting early, just having the time to do instead of rushing makes a big difference in the quality of writing. It's easier said than done, but do not procrastinate, even if the writing assignment is a couple pages long. If you at least start thinking about it early, start brainstorming early, then you will have a much more clear direction on how to write the paper. Because if you wait till the night before or even the day to try to write, there's a lot more pressure, and you might not be able to form your argument as clearly. So start early, use the resources and don't stress out too much. Starting early can help you with starting an outline as well. Having an outline, so you get what idea, what thesis you want to write, what are the points. It makes the process of writing the essay a lot easier because then you already have the skeleton, all you have to do is just add the meat. Start early on your assignments, all of your professors will provide a syllabus at the beginning of the quarter and let you know when papers and exams are going to be. I would recommend starting early because sometimes, at least that's how my process works, because I don't fully figure out what I want to say and what I want to write until I'm halfway through the paper. I feel like when I start writing to get my ideas down, but I don't really start making connections and realizing what I want to say and what might point I want to make in the papers until I've had all of the evidence written out and laid out in front of me. I would say give yourself time instead of just rushing at the end, because you want to figure out what your ideas are and then go in and polish your grammar, your spelling, your syntax, and all those other things.
