Final Post

I only decided to take ES2007S after NUS module registration was closed and all other modules had started their lectures for a week. My reason for taking this module was simple: getting a free time out of other 6 science modules. However, only after I got to know this course, I realized 7 modules per semester was not easy, AT ALL, and especially one of them frequently requires writing and presentations. :-Q

Every weekend, all my friends would not to bother me since they knew that I would lock myself inside room, writing blog online. I also remember how nervous Rach and I were when we prepared for the peer teaching, since it was first time to be a teacher in front of peer classmates, and the heat discussions and disagreement we had regarding the activities to facilitate our teaching. Then was the time for me to write the resume and cover letter. I should thank a lot to it since that I send out my resume edited in this course and got an internship opportunity in December. Also in this course, I learnt to conduct surveys and how to write out a proposal. I did suffer a lot during the process of writing my part in the proposal. Our team communicated nearly every day and met up quite frequently. I always remember we boiled night oil in student lounge the other day; I remember my mailbox was filled with proposal drafts and discussions, and I will not forget that morning when I printed out the proposal, I was so excited that I wanted everyone I knew to have a look at our product and give comments on. Times flies to the end of the semester, and we prepared for the oral presentation. Our team had an email arguing about the way to prepare for the presentation, but we finally reached to agreement and did a great job.

So what does this course bring to me? I would say it outweighed all modules I learnt in NUS. I had three semesters in NUS before this school year, in total of 15 modules learnt, and I have to admit that I forgot them all after I went to exchange. I even cannot remember the fundamental theorems in my major studies, and have to pick them up this semester. I am so glad now that at least I had one module that I won’t forget in my history of studying in NUS. This course not only taught me how to write resumes and business letters, but more significantly, it equipped me with the skills in effective communicating. I will not be that nervous to do my FYP presentation and will not be over-frustrated after entering work place, because I have been trained to communicate professionally in this course. And moreover, this course brought me a lot of friends who I also learnt from and shared laughers with.

Thank you Brad for being our teacher, you are like the teachers in my high school years back in China, who were always nice and responsible, who always cares about their students. Thank you Van and Rach to be my team mates, for the wonderful time we spent together. And thank you for all my class mates for sharing four hours together every week. Now I know many people from engineering too, and I appreciate the way engineers think which is different from how scientists do to some extend.

Hope everyone does best in the exams and may a happy holiday for you ahead!

Reflection on oral presentation

It was a good learning process of both writing the proposal and preparing the oral presentation. I found it was easier to prepare the presentation and the slides than any time before, since I have digested the topic when I wrote the proposal.

My presentation part homologize with the part I did in the proposal: the background information and the survey questions. It has been a hard time for me to write the background in the proposal, but when I prepared for the presentation, I knew it worth that I suffered writing out the proposal. I was supposed to reveal the significances of taking extra naps and showers during the day and to show the results of survey question 5 and 7 in the presentation. I meant to make everyone get the ideas how naps and showers benefit us and hope they might develop such habits, and then my teammates could deliver our topic of creation a new concept of student lounges with these facilities. Because there are many research data and textbook knowledge about the benefits of naps and shower, I thought I might do something to make it easier to understand, since most of people may get easily tired of reading research papers in the first place. Hence, I introduced in more pictures rather than texts in the slides than ever before. And for the real research experiment, I created the graphs for people to get the ideas. I hoped these vivid pictures and graphs would create some laughers and thus could catch the attention from the audience, so that they would not find it the boring to read the data.

However, problems also arise from the pictures. As one classmate said, it might be too causal to use some of the pictures in a formal presentation. Thus, I should take into consideration that whether every picture conveys meaningful points and whether they facilitates the main idea of our topic.

For the delivery of the presentation, I somehow was still so nervous that I have to have some glance of the slides to the get myself calm and focus on what I was talking about. I tried eye contact and body language, but have no idea whether they were effective.

Last but not least, it was a pleasant experience to do this project with Rach and Van. We did confront some conflicts here or there, but I appreciated that everyone in the team was able to be honest and open to communications and suggestions. We also built up our friendship through the good time and some not so good time together. By the end of the project, I get to know our team name is so true: R and D (research and development) are supposed to be open and it is definitely fun!