All Good Things Have To Come To An End

What a journey it had been! Through this module, I definitely picked up a lot of important skills and lessons that I know would benefit me in time to come. The whole purpose of me taking this module was to be able to acquire important skills like learning how to write good application letters and resumes, being able to express myself well and excelling in job interviews. And I believe I was able to learn all these throughout these 13 weeks, in one way or another. (:

Communication/life skills

For me, I believe I am now able to communicate with people better. Learning how to communicate effectively and how to NOT communicate ineffectively, I am confident that I would be able to transmit my intended messages to others more clearly as well. Comprehending all the skills to ensure more effective communication, I’ve learnt how to prevent occurrences of communication breakdown. More importantly, I’ve also learnt to stop ASSUMING as it’s a bad habit of mine that I should put a stop to. (:

The most significant thing I’ve gained is probably learning to work better with others. After working with different groups of people on different projects, I’ve come to realise that it’s not an easy feat working with people that have very different working habits compared to mine. In my opinion, compromise, cooperation and having common goals are most important in ensuring successful teamwork. Furthermore, working with people from other cultures also taught me to be more understanding towards others. It also gave me more exposure on how working with different colleagues in the future would be like.

Interactions in Class

I took up this module with 4 of my good friends, Alvin, Sylvester, Xiaoshi and Elgin. In the end, I’m glad that we didn’t really stick to each other during class. When I first stepped into the tutorial class on week 2, I looked around and felt that this would definitely be an interesting module and indeed, it was. Having classmates from all sorts of different backgrounds was really an experience and something different from the usual chemistry major students that I see everyday. Being a more vocal person, I always like to express my views in class. And it is always interesting to listen to other’s views on different issues as well. I guess that’s what makes small group tutorials a greater learning platform. It is precisely the fact that it consists of interactive learning, which allows us to learn from one another. Positive peer interaction, as what I’ve learnt from my research project. (:

Blogging is also a great way to express any views and opinions that we are not able to in class and it helps me to understand my classmates better. It really is a joy to read their blog posts, and to appreciate their fine language used, in a way increasing my level of writing skills too. Being proficient in effective communication through verbal means is definitely not enough, being able to communicate effectively through non-verbals and through written means are what complete the whole package. Through feedback from my classmates, I feel more confident of my writing now as well.

Overall learning

This module is really filled with potential benefits, with so much to gain and nothing to lose. In my opinion, it has been planned really well, with the aim of nurturing every aspect of effective communication to the students. Though I know that Brad expects quite a fair bit from all of us, I believe it is all in the intention of making us successful people in the future and I do appreciate it. (: However, with the amount of work required, I feel that this module should have at least 6 modular credits assigned to it! Haha. Jokes aside, I’m really glad to have taken this module, which I am sure to recommend to my friends as well. Thank you ES2007S! (: