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Writer's pictureMandy Foong

Critical Reflection

Module Learning

Returning back to the beginning, the goal I set for myself was to communicate my ideas in a different way from my polytechnic days. While I was studying in polytechnic, I was curt with my language since most of my teammates were my close friends and were comfortable with the way I spoke. However, upon entering university, I was pulled into a professional environment where I needed to be polite but still direct with my tone. I am pretty grateful for the activities done each week as I got to explore various ways to communicate. Be it during peer evaluations with Aleeya, Jayden, and Shameer to discuss how to better our summary reader response on the James Webb Space Telescope or when I worked with Lucas and Samual in a lighthearted way to brainstorm lessons that we had learned, unlearned, relearned and were keen on learning. During each team activity, I got to interact with more diverse groups of people, relearn how to better understand my teammates and get my message across.


The next step I would like to work on about myself is not exactly a skill, but finding a more efficient way to process my thoughts. My wish would be to find the right words to say naturally without overcomplicating or overthinking what I want to communicate to others. And I know that this comes not through life lessons, but through a long period of practice which I will have to consciously put an effort into before I can achieve complete mastery over my language. In the end, this still comes back to the point where language is both science and art. Language is beautiful logic that requires both understanding and passion behind it.


Project Learning

In the eight weeks with my team, Seat Book, I learned that good presentation skills are not just used once per module, specifically during oral presentation week. Presentation is a skill that should be used in every moment of our lives. When it comes to communicating ideas to our groupmates, we are required to pitch our ideas so that can everyone understand and be deeply invested in our idea. Even as we were writing the tech report, it was essential for each teammate to effectively deliver their ideas for the report to the group and go into detail on what they would like others to do. Some examples of presenting my thoughts to my teammates were when I was requesting help and needed to explain what I needed them to do, or when I gave them advice on what could be improved upon. It was through this form of presenting ideas that we could avoid any miscommunication, ensuring that each task was done effectively.


As the team lead of Seat Book, I had a responsibility to bridge each group member to the other. I came to understand that being team lead was not just about driving the group to the next milestone, it also involved keeping everyone on the same page and prompting frequent communication with one another. It was vital for me to hear out each team member's thoughts and then rephrase them into layman's terms when presenting the details back to the group as a whole. Through the many weeks of working with my team, I got to learn my weakness and identify my strengths as a presenter when I talked with my teammates. At the end of the oral presentation, I came out feeling proud of us, because the culmination of all our ideas and efforts had worked in harmony to create a great pitch. This feat was only possible because we were able to present our ideas to each other so effectively in the first place. At the end of the project, I found the beauty in effective communication through the proper presentation of my thoughts and ideas.

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