Reflecting on my business writing class

One of the nicest things about my last quarter at UCLA was the lighter courseload I took, which allowed me to enjoy the non-academic parts of college so much more.

Besides taking a natural language processing course to finish up my data engineering minor and a Soviet cinema class just for fun, the last class I needed to graduate with my Business Economics degree was Eng Comp 131B — writing for business and social policy.

And it was quite enjoyable — the professor was very nice and chill, my classmates were all graduating seniors, too, and we laughed a ton together each week. It was a nice combination of being relatively fun and interesting, not that much work, and in the late morning, meaning I found myself looking forward to attending class.

Long story short, the class was designed to teach students the different writing “items” (I couldn’t think of a better word lol) that one might encounter in the process of entering or living in the business world.

In lecture, our professor shared how to create these different items and all the elements that go into it, followed by a student presentation regarding a chapter of the professional development book we read in tandem. In order, these different assignments were:

• Professional email and memo

• Executive summary

• Resume

• Cover letter

• Opinion editorial (I was EXTREMELY proud of mine!)

• Non-profit grant proposal

• Final group presentation on a real company’s PR crisis

These assignments were quite interesting, and I did enjoy the runway we had in scope and material we could cover — any relevant topic was fair game for our work, and it was cool to see the different subjects my peers and I chose for each assignment. Plus, the conversations and group discussions we had in that class were quite fun, and dare I say even therapeutic.

The final thing to note about my professor is that she’s very particular about her formatting and proper citations, which I particularly struggled with throughout the entire course (lol). If you’ve read any of my articles before, you know I throw standard formatting out the window pretty much immediately, so a big part of the course was me learning to suck it up and format the way she wanted. She also kept insisting that there was no way that AI could properly cite in APA, but I learned pretty quickly that Perplexity is, in fact, quite good at doing so.

But that’s beside the point.

And so similar to when I shared my application responses to get into my upper-division economics research class, I figured I’d share my thoughts on the class and all the work I created for it for the following reasons:

1. It’s a great addition to my writing archive/portfolio, and something for me to look back on and read fondly later.

2. I love writing, and want to share my work with more people in the hopes of sharing wisdom in an entertaining fashion.

Alright, that’s enough of me talking. Let’s do this thing!