Final Reflection on Learning (Post #4)

Another semester in NUS is almost over, and we have come to an end in the journey of Professional Communication. Through this module, I completed many types of different tasks, individually or with my teammates. This blog post is a great opportunity for me to reflect on my performance in these tasks. Here, I will pick a few to talk about.

In the beginning of this semester, Li Ying and I were assigned to carry out our peer-teaching session on 7Cs of writing and how to write business letters. This peer-teaching session is special for me because of the time constraint. As we were the first group to conduct peer-teaching session, we only had 8 days for preparation, which included reading through materials, looking for videos, designing activities, making PowerPoint slides and dry runs. With our other modules going on, we still managed to present an effective teaching session. Through this peer-teaching, I learnt to prepare presentations with limited time. The key is to plan for every day’s work and to work with 100% focus. And time constraint should not be an excuse for underperformance.

Later in the semester, each student went through a round of mock interviews. I did not have much time to prepare for that, and my interview did not go well. Through this experience, I learnt the importance of preparation before interviews. If I had prepared for that mock interview, not only would I have answered the interview questions more properly, I would also have had more confidence during the interview, instead of having too much hesitation. Another lesson I learnt from this experience was the importance of a period of solitude before the interview. Being silent and alone for 10 minutes before the interview helps me to concentrate, without making me more nervous. These are the points I need to take care of in the future interviews.

Above are some lessons I learnt from this course. To end this blog post, I would like to thank Madam Fazilah for her teaching, suggestions and experience-sharing, Rachel and Li Ying for their efforts during team-based projects, Anna for her help in the tasks during other groups’ peer-teaching sessions, and everyone else for this wonderful learning journey.

Reflection on Team-based Research Project Proposal (Post #3)

Over the past two months, two of my teammates and I have paid tremendous efforts into our project about sex education in Singapore. There were times when we were extremely efficient and able to make a huge progress within a short period of time. Of course, there were also times when we were stuck in research or some parts of proposal, and we could not work efficiently. But generally, my teammates and I have shown great caring for each other as well as determination to complete our project. Now that this project is about to come to an end, I would like to talk about one thing that our team has done well and one thing we can improve in the future.

Our team have shown great time management skills throughout the semester. From my observation, many of my friends are very reluctant to do their project. In fact, for a project that would take one semester to finish, most of them would do almost nothing in the first half of the semester, and only start to work on the project when the deadline is about one month away. However, no team can complete the project well in this way. Because at the end of a semester, other courses will also have many submission deadlines around and it is very hard to cope with so many assignments simultaneously. Besides, this way of doing projects makes group members very exhausted. What our team did was to finish researching in a short period of time and start to work on certain parts of our project that could be done early (e.g. letter of transmittal and background information). We also planned a detailed schedule for the second half of the semester and followed them strictly. In this way, we managed to finish about 70% of our final report by Week 10. And we used the rest of the semester to keep revising our proposal and work on the oral presentation. Hence in the future, I will plan early for my team’s schedule and follow them strictly just like this time, when I am involved in other projects.

However, there are also some areas that we can improve ourselves in the future. For instance, we should learn to organise our documents and files in the future. In the first few weeks of the semester, our Dropbox folder did not have any sub-folders. Inside the Dropbox folder, there were various files about different aspects of background information we find on the Internet, early drafts of letters of transmittal and other pictures. It affected our efficiency to work on our project because we had to spend much time trying to find a certain document before we can open it. The situation did not improve until we finally made our minds to create different sub-folders for different kinds of documents. The lesson I learnt from this is to always keep our resources organised, because this would drastically improve our efficiency when working. Besides, it also helps to keep workers in good mood since nobody wants to look for what they want in a mess of documents.

Working on this project with my teammates have made me learn a lot through this semester. What do you think you have learnt during your project progress?

Evaluating Intercultural Behavior (Post #2)

Singapore is known for its various races, religions and culture. The government has also done very well to keep the harmony and peace among its people for the past 50 years. But even in this country, small tensions caused by intercultural differences are still inevitable, just like the following experience I witnessed before.

On a Saturday night about 3 years ago, I was having dinner with my friends in a Chinese restaurant in Clarke Quay. There were other customers around, including several Singaporeans and some Chinese who were probably working in Singapore. During the dinner, several Chinese customers started to talk so loudly that all other customers in that restaurant can hear them. While other Chinese customers were unaffected, the Singaporean customers were clearly very annoyed by the noise. Some of them stared at the loudly talking Chinese customers a few times but received no reply. Eventually, the Singaporean customers left the restaurant very unhappily even before they could finish their meal.

Now when I looked back, this is a typical example of how different culture clash with each other. In China when people eat in a restaurant, it would not be inappropriate for them to talk or laugh loudly. Instead, the restaurant actually likes to see its customers talking loudly while eating, because the noise in a restaurant shows that the restaurant is popular and having many customers. And that attracts more customers, who may think that the dishes in that restaurant are delicious. So for me, I personally understand why some Chinese customers tend to speak loudly in a restaurant. However, as it says, “When in Rome, do as Romans do.” I think foreigners have the liability to learn about the local culture and habits, in order to refrain themselves from offending other people. And that’s the way to reduce intercultural frictions and foster better communication.

Resolving Interpersonal Conflict (Post #1)

Back in the Junior College (JC) life, doing Project Work (PW) in groups of five was a special memory for most of the students. Many teammates developed their friendship after the PW as well. However, PW was not really a beautiful memory for my group.

At first, things were going very smooth and without much effort, we submitted our Preliminary Idea to our supervisor successfully. But later when we needed to dig deeper into our topic and expand the width and depth of our proposal, we found that a guy in our group, Robert, were often late for more than half an hour for our meetings. Besides, during our discussion, he was quiet for most of the time when the rest of us were brainstorming ideas. In fact, he even fell asleep sometimes during our discussion. When we asked him for an explanation, he told us that he was the only one who lived in the east. And the meeting was always held in the west because the rest of us lived nearby. And he had to wake up very early to attend the meeting. Despite being a little doubtful that he was only using this as an excuse, we accepted his explanation.

Unfortunately, this was not the end of the story. As we moved on to the second half of the year, we found that Robert was making less contribution to the project than before. He was still very unpunctual for meeting; he hardly opened his mouth during group discussion; and he even stopped doing his part of the group proposal. We thought about reporting this problem to the supervisor, but we were afraid that this would reflect badly to our group. To finish the project, the four of us had to make up Robert’s part. Our team went into a mess and none of us received a good grade for PW.

Do you think there’s anything we could have done better?