3 Chained Skills Mini-Action Plan

Improving skills is always good for becoming a better person and professional, the following three skills, I know I lack of them or part of them and need to improve them.

1. Fluency. Useful as a way for expressing ideas and making me understand more easily and clearer.
2. Communication. By gaining fluency, communication can be improved. Communication is an important skill for participating and socializing.
3. Team-Work. With communication and fluency teamwork can be achieved(that's why I called them the chained skills), that is what future society is about, working and achieving work not alone but with others. Three brains think better that one.

To improve fluency, shyness must not exist, interacting and participating in class and with others is a good way to practice and improve it. Although I know fluency can't be gained from one that to another, it can be achieved with dedicated work, being conscious you want to achieve it, that is why I know that by final semester my fluency would have improved significantly.

By achieving a step in fluency, the next step is start interacting with other, once again shyness can't exist and communicating must become a daily activity in everyones life. To improve communication courage must be met and a broad vocabulary must be learned also. This way by improving fluency, communication will also improve parallel to it, and it would be improved during the whole semester.

At last, by improving the two past skills, team work can be reached and the chain must have reached its goal, for know. Being more open minded and trusting in others and that their knowledge and work is valid also, it is a good way to start by working in teamwork. Although to reach teamwork it need from the other two skills, once again they can work parallel by improving all three at the same time through this semester. This is because this 3 skills are not skill that can be reached from one day to another but by working, being dedicated and willing for them.

The Missing Basics: Do they really miss?

According to professor Goldberg missing basics, in which he believes engineers aren't prepared to ask, label, model, decompose, measure, visualize and communicate, I would doubt, as future engineer, in some of this basics like asking, measuring, visualizing and communicating.

Although I agree in certain way that us, as engineers don;t know how to ask, during my education received in Colombia they do taught us how to ask. Asking was taught to us also as a possibility to open doors, to understand, to learn and to go beyond the knowledge of what is being told and heard. Asking is one step of the modern education in Colombia, we believe that without asking education and learning would not exist. The teacher or the lecturer aren't always right, they also are humans and they can commit mistakes, that is why asking i s so important in our life.

Measuring, is one of the basics and skills that every student should have, or at least a great proportion of them. This basic is such an important one, due in any field research or just in a lab, that at least once in a lifetime an student has had one of those(we did a lot at school). Measuring needs to be known, so that an experiment can be done, or data can be recollected, and results and conclusions could be drawn afterwards, referring to precision or accuracy, between others.

Visualizing, was also taught to us by the simple fact of doing summaries and drawing conclusions about reading or based on works. How to draw sketches and diagrams was always a really good way to remember things and to understand ideas much clearer, sometimes ideas from a causal chain situation.

At last, we have Communication. To finish, to conclude and to draw conclusions and results was always a higher step taught to us in Philosophy class(from where all the behind basics come from for Prof. Goldberg). Finding the way to express the others our ideas, always led to a discussion, which in a causal way, led to results and general ideas that made thing much easier.

Although I disagree in the way Prof. Goldberg thinks that we lack of some of this missing basics, and that engineers are only made up from math, science and engineering sciences, reinforcing this basics is never bad and learning new ones like labeling, modeling, and decomposing is much better, I believe that by reinforcing this basics that some of us might have and others don't, will make us much better engineers.