Final Reflection

The knowledge and benefits that I gained from the professional communication course are tremendous. I am sure the effective communication skills I learnt from this course will be useful in the rest of my life journey.

Before taking this course, I thought non verbal communication (NVC) is not very useful since we can communicate verbally. But through this module, I realized that NVC is important and it can make the communication more effective. It is also different from culture to culture and place to place. Therefore , intercultural communication cannot be left out because culture links to a wide range of human feelings and identity. I have also learnt that we need to practise how to listen carefully and actively to others in order to create effective communications.

The resume and job application cover letter writing have improved my writing capabiilties.I have applied a few jobs and gone for job interviews in the past. But I never knew that my cover letter needed to be matched with the job requirements. What I did wrongly was just prepared one general cover letter and submited my job applications by using this general letter. Thanks to ES2007S course and Ms Kim, I learnt how to draft a proper resume and promote myself. Learning taking meeting minutes and preparing meeting agenda is very useful for future career life.

Needless saying, doing research project and giving oral presentations skills will help me a lot for my next year final year projects and design projects. Having a blog buddy and receiving comments from friends improved my weaknesses and understand better others’ persepectives.

Overall, through this effective communication course, I have learnt various useful skills.

Nang's Biodata

I was born in Taunggyi, the Capital of Shan State, Myanmar. I am interested in Civil Engineering field since young. After completing high school in Taunggyi, Myanmar, I came to study in Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore. I studied Civil and Environmental Engineering Diploma Course in Ngee Ann. During Polytechnic days, I involved in many CCA activities such as helping out in community services and school events, joined NP swimming team and other clubs.Currently, I am pursuing my Civil Engineering Degree in National University of Singapore. My other interests are reading fiction books, swimming, travelling around, home decorating etc.

Reflecting on the Research Project Experience

I have gained new experiences by doing research project. I have done many reports in the past. But most of them are technical reports. At first, I expected that we can do the reports easily. But in reality, our group faced many problems and I realized that doing report was not as easy as what I expected.

All the three members of us are international students. Therefore some knowledge we have are limited to certain ranges. Whenever we discussed about the project, we all had gone into very details and ended up with unsatisfied answer. As English is not our mother tongues, our communications was also not very effective. We all can communicate well in our daily lives, but come to detailed discussion; we could not mention what we meant clearly. As the result, we took longer discussion time and had to put in more efforts than others to complete the tasks. We divided the tasks equally and take full responsibility to complete own tasks. We have spent long time on doing research and interpreting results of surveys due to many revision and edition.

However, as we all are being good team players, we managed to overcome all the difficulties and finish our task on time as other groups did. I personally feel we have built new interpersonal relationships. Sometimes, we did not communicate verbally, but from seeing the facial expressions during meeting, we were able to find out what our group members wanted to say. We keep contacts with group members through sms and e mail everyday to update our report status.

Therefore, I would like to summarize that although there were some weaknesses like minor disagreements, communications and weak report writing skills, we were able to finish the report successfully. The research projects benefits me in many ways.

Evaluating Intercultural Behaviors

Three years ago, my cousin was invited to attend one of her Singaporean friends’ wedding dinner. The wedding dinner was celebrated at one of the five stars hotels at downtown Singapore. It was the first wedding dinner she was ever invited in Singapore. The bride was her office colleague. She did not make any confirmation with the bride when she received the wedding invitation card as she thought she did not need to do so. On the wedding day, when she arrived the hotel, the usher asked her to go to the reception and get the table number .When my cousin checked at the reception, she found that her name was not in the list. She was very embarrassed and did not know how to react about it. Luckily, the wedding coordinator who was also her colleague helped her to get a seat.
From this wedding, she realized everybody has to confirm the attendance for wedding invitation. Back to our country, Myanmar, we do not practice it. People do not have to confirm and they usually bring along family members to attend the wedding ceremony. Singaporeans use to hold wedding dinner in a restaurant or hotel. This might probably be the reason why we need to confirm our attendances as the cost is expensive. In Myanmar, people celebrates wedding at both city hall and hotels but the wedding cost is not as expensive as in Singapore.
My cousin also brought a porcelain tea pot and cups set as a wedding gift for her colleague. But at the wedding, she found nobody brought such presents and all of them gave red packets. In Myanmar, we have the culture of giving wedding presents and rarely give money. From this incident, we can see the intercultural differences between the Singaporean and the Myanmese on the wedding celebration. I believe there are many more intercultural differences on other matters. Therefore, to communicate effectively with everyone, we should always observe, explore and understand different intercultural behaviors. And I believe this will help us avoid the misunderstandings and miscommunications.

Potential Research Project Proposal

There are four internal shuttle bus services A (A1, A2), B, C and D running on campus. Bus service (BTC) is running to and fro Kent Ridge campus and Bukit Timah Campus (law school). These internal shuttle buses provide students and outsiders free transports services on campus so that they can reach their destinations within short time. However, many students encountered problems of reaching the destinations in time during peak hours. This happened to those students who need to attend consecutive class at the other faculty. Most of the buses are crowded even though the bus frequency range is short. Sometimes students even have to stand on the bus steps and take bus in order to attend the next class in time.

For this matter, we need to conduct a survey on NUS students to find out the feasibilie ways to fit the matter.

The hypothesis is “most of the students face the crowded shuttle bus problem “.

The objective is to find out the feasible ways to fit the crowded bus service problem for students’ conveniences.

The feasible solutions can be submitted to the Office of Student Affairs or School Estate Development Office for implementation.

Resolving Interpersonal Conflict

It was an incident that happened in 2004. We were assigned to design a bridge model which will be stress tested on its maximum load. The bridge that can take the heaviest load (weight) with the best design will get awarded. In our group, there was only one local student and the rest were international students from different countries. At first, we were very enthusiastic and excited about the project. We named the bridge “United Bridge”. We tried many designs and tested it in the lab with various loadings and observed which design is the best.

After a few weeks, one of our international student group members suddenly disappeared. We simply thought that she was busy. But a few days later she shocked us with her own new bridge design. It was the arch bridge and we knew it was very difficult to design as a model. She suggested that the design was perfect and that we should use it as our project model. Initially, we did not accept it as it was not our group’s work. But we all know that the arch bridge was the strongest bridge among all and we finally agreed to accept it as our group work. Surprisingly, on the actual day, our classmates pointed out that it was not our group’s work. They called it that person’s bridge. We did not know what she told to the rest of our classmates and we felt remorseful and sad. The other bad thing is the bridge even could not take half of the expected weight. As soon as the test was over, she mentioned it was her own bridge and she did not allow us to take pictures of the broken bridge for the follow up analysis presentation.

Luckily we had taken photos of our previous bridge models and managed to show them as evidence of our team’s work. Nevertheless, we all were able to score above average for this project as our lecturer knew of our contributions. We avoided her though we still talk to her superficially. How would you feel and solve this conflict if you were in our place??

Why developing effective communication skills is important!

Every mankind communicates everyday, but in different ways. Even a very simple matter cannot be solved without appropriate communication. Therefore effective communication skills are very essentials for all of us. There are many communication networks and channels we are using in our daily life such as oral communications, written communications, non verbal communications, internal personnel communications etc.

We have always noticed that those who are friendly and good in conversational skills get more popularity and get more chances to success than the rest. But for some, even though their own abilities are good, they are not success as much as they should be due to communications barrier like language problems, lack of active listening to others, lack of cultural self-awareness etc.

I believe most of the people are not perfect in communications. We always face at least one of the above communications barriers. However, as there is a saying “where there is a will, there is a way”, we can always learn to improve our communications skills through many ways. We cannot learn all those skills within a day or a year. It is a life long learning process, I believe. Our communication back in primary school level was definitely different from what we are using in university level today. Like wise, what we communicate at university level today cannot be the same as our communication ways as in our future careers.

Therefore as we grow older, we will need to communicate with more and more people for more purposes. In order to get more opportunities and success in life, we must definitely know well how to communicate effectively with people around us. For that, we should continue developing effective communication skills and practicing them in our daily life wisely.