Final Reflection on Learning

S witching my major from Applied Mathematics to Quantitative Finance in the last semester, I had to face the competition with students from NUS Business School who had strong communication and speech skills. In order to narrow the gap and catch up with them, I had no hesitation in taking ES2007S. It was a great experience as I learnt much about professional communication as well some resume-writing and job interview skills. In addition, I realized that there was a room for me to improve in terms of communication skills. From 13-weeks study, I have learnt the proper way of writing an application letter and resume. This was extremely useful for me in applying for internship and industrial attachment. Before taking this module, I had no idea about the format of application letters and never realized that a good cover letter could make me stand out from other applicants. In addition, I had a valuable opportunity to gain an insight on how the actual interview looks like through the mock interview session. During these sessions, I played the roles of interviewer and interviewee. When I was the interviewee, I felt so stressful that I could not give the interviewer well-rounded answers to most of the questions. To make things worse, because of my nervousness, I failed to speak English in a formal and proper way, thus leading to confusion and misunderstanding. On the other hand, when I played my role as an interviewer, I also realized some mistakes of my friend such as improper tone. During the feedback session, we kindly pointed the weaknesses to each other and provided some suggestions. This valuable experience improved my interview skills significantly. Besides, I figured that preparation is the key to success in the job interview. I really appreciated Dr Radhika’s words:  Last but not least, I sincerely thank Dr Radhika and my ES2007S classmates for making this modules one of the most helpful I have taken.

My reflection on oral presentation

My reflection on oral presentation

-------Hopefully I can present as good as Steve Jobs in the future

With our oral presentation last Tuesday, my team has marked an end of series of oral presentations in ES2007S. In spite of some technical problems during my presentation, I really satisfied about my overall performance. Everything went smoothly and accordingly to our plan. It is a really good experience to work with Weirong, Liying and Grace who helped me greatly. 

Preparation:

Our proposal is to set up various food vendors around our campus. My part is to introduce recommended vendors that we are going to bring into NUS. Besides simply mentioning about tastes and prices of food, our group decided to buy the real food and ask the audience to taste them during my presentation. It would definitely make our presentation more impressive, clear and attractive.

To be honest, my group really made an effort in preparing the presentation. We spent the whole Saturday in preparing our scripts and slides. Under the help of Weirong and Liying, I restructured my slides and made it more attractive. Grace corrected and rephrased many sentences in my scripts. Therefore, I would like to say a big thank to Weirong, Liying and Grace.

In the coming Sunday, I spent the whole afternoon in watching Steve Jobs’ presentation from Youtube and tried to imitate his way of speaking. Hopefully, I can present as good as him in the future.

Presentation:

During the presentation, I tried my best to talk slowly and stay calm. In addition, I tried to have eye contact with the audience. However, I was quite nervous, especially when the clicker became accidentally insensitive and did not work when I pressed it. As a result, I had to go to press the latop button. This made my presenatation not as continuous as expected.Nevertheless, compared to my peer teaching, I felt that my performance this time improved a lot, as my presentation was generally smooth and clear. The difference between me and Jobs, in the area of oral presenatation, becomes less :)

The following is a part of conversation records screenshotted from skype:
 

Intercultural Communication

The Best Way to Handle Intercultural Miscommunication

                                                    --Looking back upon my first year in Singapore

S

ingapore is really a beautiful country. The beauty of Singapore is reflected by not only its clean environment, but also many good characters of Singaporean. Six years ago when I reached Singapore for the first time, I was isolated by the traditional Chinese cultures. Those Chinese traditions were not generally accepted, especially by those non-Chinese race students. This inevitably led to misunderstandings and unnecessary quarreling. Fortunately, thanks to our local mentor’s tireless and earnest advices, the misunderstanding did not last long :) The followings are some fragments of my first year’s life in Singapore.

When I came to Victoria School for the first time six years ago, everything was new and very unusual for me. For the first week I could never understand what people expected from me. The style of living was absolutely dissimilar. To be honest, I had never experienced such a hot weather. The environment of study was also quite different. Instead of studying at school for a whole day, school was over at 2pm every day. Such a light study schedule made me really anxious about my O-level performance in 2 years later. I was confusing what MOE expected from my academic results. Some of my friends even thought that MOE deliberately allocated such easy study plan for us and would suspend our scholarship in two years. One of my friends, also from China, seriously complained about the study schedule and criticized the educational system in Singapore to our mentors. To our surprise, our mentors did not quarrel with us directly. He told us the importance of CCAs (Co-curricular activities) and showed us various trophies achieved by different CCA groups. Unlike China, CCA results were counted in our O-level results. After his conversation, our argument petered out.

Another barrier is the language problems. Because of lack of equivalences in vocabulary, it generally produced the difficulties in the translation. Six years ago when our English skills were quite poor, we even could not distinguish the formal and informal words and chose the correct tone. As a result, this led to numerous misunderstanding in our conservation, especially with some other scholars from Vietnam and Indian. Once my friend had seriously quarreled with another scholar, the reason was that he used some sensitive and offensive words which I could not remember. At that time, he had absolutely no meaning of offense. He simply did not come up with an appropriate word to express his opinion. Feeling to be discriminated, the Indian scholar seriously blamed my friend. The quarrel quieted down when our mentor came and translated our words in a proper way.

Therefore, the best way to handle intercultural misunderstanding is to consider others before self. The feelings would be completely different when you see from other’s viewpoint. Last but not least, thank to those who have ever helped me.

Thank you.---Mr Ang, Mr Low, Mr Wang, Mr Wong, Mdm Lim, Mdm Wong and ….. :)