Final Reflection on the Course

It has been more than 12 weeks since I had entered the ES2007S: Professional Communication course module. Now, the course was about to end. Throughout these 12 weeks, I had enjoyed a lot of fun and enlightening moments in dwelling into the fields of professional communication.

I can still remember the first day when I entered this class. The main reason why I had entered this class was because I did not take up many modules for this semester, hence I need to find another module. Then, when I came across this module, I thought that it might prove very useful for me in the future; so I entered this class. After spending 12 weeks in this class, I was glad that I had made a wise choice.

When I first entered this class, everyone in the class was quiet, mainly because we were all strangers to one another. Of course, after the first week, we got to know more about one another after an ice-breaking session on the first day and being grouped together for different kinds of discussions. During the preparations for peer teaching and oral presentation, I made new friends as we had to work as a team. Everyone in the class was friendly and full of fun; it was nice knowing all of them.

As for the classes, they were all enjoyable. Brad is a great teacher. He inspired the class to interact and think, by interacting with the entire class himself. Unlike most lecturers in NUS, he did not "spoon feed" us, but he would give us hints and ideas for us to think for ourselves during his lessons. A few things that he did stress in his lessons, though, was about the importance of intercultural relationships. For example, he did emphasize a lot of times that overgeneralization and stereotyping must be avoided for every intercultural behaviour. For a class filled with a mixture of students from China, Singapore, Malaysia, and even Indonesia and Vietnam, I guess it is reasonable why interracial tolerance must be emphasized repeatedly. Brad had also been helpful in our assignments, such as application letters, resumes, peer teaching and oral presentations. He would give advices on how to correct our English language mistakes in our resumes, application letters and blog posts, and how we should overcome our problems in the peer teaching and oral presentations. For example, my group encountered the problem of not receiving responses from our intended interviewees for our proposal, so Brad advised us to look for Ms. Balkise, secretary of CELC, and even gave us her contacts. Thanks to Brad, we managed to receive some useful information from Ms. Balkise, and use these informations for our proposal.

I have learnt a lot of important lessons throughout this course. Firstly, I have learnt how to write my own resume and application letter, since I have never written them myself before. I have learnt more about interpersonal conflict and interracial relationships through the blog posts posted by my classmates, and how to prevent such unnecessary conflicts by exercising tolerance and understanding to others. From these blog posts, I have learnt many examples of how such cases of interpersonal and interracial conflicts can occur, and how they can be resolved or avoided. From the mock interview sessions, I have learnt what to expect from a real-life job interview, so that I can be more prepared in the future. Then, there are the peer teaching and oral presentation sessions. From these presentations, the stress to make a presentation in front of the entire class would not only make me learn in depth about the topic that I am going to present, it would also build up my confidence in delivering a speech in front of a crowd. Before I entered this course, I was a usually shy person who did not speak much, let alone speaking in front of a crowd. As a result, I would often stutter in front of others during a public speech. After this class, however, I feel more confident in speaking in front of others.

Besides the above mentioned, I have also learnt a lot of other skills, such as conducting an interview, conducting a survey, analyzing statistical results, and many more. There is simply too many things for me to list down.

Like all things, this course would eventually have to come to an end. I would like to say a big word of thank you to Brad, and all the fellow classmates of ES2007S: Professional Communication Group 10.

Thank you for this enjoyable 12 weeks of fun! This module would be my most unforgettable one in my entire stay in NUS!

Review on Project Oral Presentation

I had just recently completed my group's project oral presentation for our ES2007S: Professional Communication module in NUS. My team, also known as Team Gaia, had been conducting a research project to find out the extent of printing paper reduction in NUS, and how to further reduce the usage of printing paper. For weeks, our group have been conducting surveys and interviews just to gain evidence for the background of our project, so that we can prove that paper wastage is still a big problem in NUS despite the current measures taken (such as default double-sided printing in all printing points). After weeks of doing primary research, we had successfully compiled our finds into a proposal, and prepared an oral presentation of our proposal to the entire ES2007S Group 10.

Talking about the presentation, I would like to say again is that the oral presentation is a great way of learning not just for others, but for ourselves too. Frankly speaking, I had never heard of the OES "Paper Recyling Pilot Project" until I am doing this research. The project gave us a chance to see the current trend of printing paper usage in NUS, allowing us to be more aware that we could impose some actions to further reduce the usage of printing paper. More importantly, the stress to present our proposal in front of a group will force us to learn a lot about our presentation topics so that we can be adequately prepared to present. For Team Gaia's oral presentation, I believed that all of us were fully prepared for our presentation and had done very well. This shows that peer pressure can sometimes be a good teacher.

If I were to recall the biggest challenge for our project, I believed that it would be conducting the primary research for our project, mainly the survey and interview. The number of respondents for our survey was not as many as we hoped for, and we had difficulty in contacting the people that we had wanted to interview. This shows that primary research is not as easy as it sounds, since the kind of results that you expect would have to depend on the response of others. When the deadline of the proposal was drawing near, we had no choice but to settle on using the results from the small number of responses.

The project oral presentation is one of the last major presentation for the ES2007S module, so is the ES2007S course module itself. I am glad that our team's oral presentation has finally ended. All of us were happy with our presentations, and we believed our weeks of hard work had finally paid off.

How about you? How do you think about our presentation? Please kindly leave a comment for this post.

Thank you for your kind and generous comments!