Final Reflection on Learning

  Time flies, 12 weeks has passed by so quickly. This blog post marks an end to the "Professional Communication" course that I am taking. But what I have taken away from the course will definitely be beneficial for the rest of my life.

  Look back to the time when I just joined the course, I was expecting a course that is full of presentation only. I had that mentality because I am mapping ES2007S to my core module CG1413 that I did not take on the previous semester. And that module I was told to only do presentation for the project of CG1103 because CG1413 is bundled to it.However, after being through the course for the first few weeks, I realised I was completely wrong. I could still remember that Dr Radhika asked us to talk about what each of us wants to take away from this course. My answer to that is polish my writing skills and presentation style since I am already quite confident in presentation.

  To my surprise, not only I learnt what I wanted but so much more than that.For the very first stage when we are doing peer tutoring, the style is completely different from a presentation. I have to present my materials and engaged the audience at the same time. It is a huge jump from just presentation because interacting with audience will definitely increase the level of nervousness.

  Gradually, I start to learn more about communication. Communication, I understood it to be just verbal communication between two or more parties earlier. But from the enriching course that I have been through, I understood that non-verbal communication is actually playing a more important role in professional communication. This is because others is able to understand the true intention of your verbal speeches from your non-verbal cues.

  Perhaps, the biggest take away from the course is that not only I am able to realised my mistakes and areas that I am lacking, but also I have digged out the potential in me. All this will not be possible from the feedbacks and suggestions that I obtained from Dr Radhika and my fellow classmates.

  In conclusion,I would like to present my appreciation towards Dr Radhika and my fellow friends in ES2007S for the fruitful 12 weeks that I have spent with all of you. I would sincerely accept all your comments towards me and improve myself bits by bits from now on.

Reflection on Team-based Project Proposal

  For this Team-based project, I was put into a group with Liyana and Disheng. And since the day when the group is formed, we have already come up with the area that we want our project to cover. I was very impressed by Liyana not only because of her creative ideas, but also she is very resourceful too. She is the lead and the key person that persuaded us to looking into the area of safe cycling. And thanks to that, our group is able to set the focus within such a short period of time.

  At that point of time, I thought everything would fall in place easily but time proves me that I was wrong.

 

  Looking back to the time when we just started to plan how our proposal should progress towards now that we have completed it, almost ninety percent of our meetings are conducted online using google docs. This is because the very fact that we could not really find a common slot to have face-to-face meeting. I could still remember how we planned the each and every task for the following meetings on the first meeting when everyone comes to an agreement. We distributed the work among three of us to do research individually before coming to the next meeting. However, mid-term examination was around the corner then, each of us needs to revise on different day since we have different examination date, so the execution of scheduled task was delayed. That is the first obstacle that our group encountered and that is the main challenge that leads to only a short period of time dedicated to writing of proposal.

  Furthermore, I think for such a project, everyone should be responsible for the task that is assigned and also be responsible towards your whole team. I understand that is very difficult to even find a common time to conduct online meeting, but when the timing is set and one of the member might not make it, he or she should task up the responsibility to inform the whole team about it. He or she should not assume that informing the team leader is equivalent to inform the whole team. I was very frustrated then when I was not inform and I waited for almost an hour before I found out myself there wasn’t any meeting that night.

  In conclusion, from the obstacles that I encountered was indeed due to the fact of lack of communication between team members. If there is a proper form of communication in place, I believe the project would have gone through a much smoother progress.