Friday, 15 of November 2013, will be a day I will not forget easily. To mark the end of the module ES2007S, we ordered in pizza. I had one slice. I thought I was satisfied. I was wrong. On the way home, I could not get the taste of the pizza out from my mouth, the smell from my fingers, the thought of it from my mind. The torment grew until I had succumbed to my temptation. That night, I Elisha Aslivatham, ate one and a half extra large Meat Lovers pizza. Oh how wonderfully horrible it was.

Well the semester has come to an end, and with it, ES2007S too. Among all the modules I have taken this semester, I truly enjoyed this module the most. Not only did I get to know more different and interesting people, I also got a firsthand experience on how to prepare and what to expect for my future job. There were some teaching sessions that really opened my eyes and changed the way I thought about some things. I especially gained a lot from the lessons about personal branding, resumes and application letters and the one on assertive skills.

I knew that first impressions always mattered, but I did not know that there was so much more to it. I knew that sometimes being different from the masses could be good, but I never really knew to portray my differences as my strengths. Most of the times, I felt that ‘being in the crowd’ was always better than ‘standing out from the crowd’. During the class on personal branding, Dr Radhika taught us how to use our USP’s to not only stand out from the crowd, but to also create a positive impact on our future employers, colleagues etc. Mind-blown.  I also felt that the lesson on application letters was very helpful (honestly I really did not know that there was actually a need for application letters, but I found out how important they really were.)

But I think that the lesson that I really gained most from was the one on assertive skills. In the past, I was usually quite submissive. But after entering army, I began to become more aggressive. (Actually I did not really know I was being aggressive, but a lot of people would tell me to ‘relax’ after I say something I mean). Due to this, I was quite apprehensive to speak to people I do not know cause I was afraid that they would fine me aggressive and just have a bad impression about me. The lesson taught us how to be neither submissive nor aggressive and still manage to get things done. I really felt that this lesson helped me. Now I have the proper skill set to talk to new people.

Besides these, there were many more points that I learned from the whole course that I felt was very good, like for example, ‘starting with an opening story’ (which I did above). The projects allowed us to work with people that we would not usually work with, which made us practice the skills taught. So I truly believe that this course has helped me to become a ‘potential professional communicator’. In conclusion, the module was not only fun, but very practical in molding a better communicator. 

Team Project: Proposal writing

We had to come up with a proposal regarding a particular issue in Singapore which we were concerned about. After creating the proposal, we had to present it to the class too. We were divided into teams of two to three by drawing lots. My group members were Edmund Yap and Yip Kin Wai, and our chosen topic was about safety of cyclists on the road.

I have had the pleasure of working with Kin Wai before for another presentation. Thus I kind of ‘knew’ him. However, I had not worked with Edmund before. As such, I did not really ‘know’ him. But after working with him for a few weeks, I understood him better and the three of us became good friends although there were some misunderstandings along the way between the three of us. These misunderstandings we not because of our character differences, but rather due to the lack of understanding about what we really wanted for our project.

We were given the opportunity to choose the issue with which we were concerned with. Automatically, each of us suggested ideas which were very interesting to us. The only problem was that each idea that each of us suggested, did not interest the other members of the group. We decided that we would think about other ideas and relay them to each other before our next class. But due to our busy schedules, all three of us did not think of better ideas to suggest. So, as time was running out, we came to an agreement that our topic would be about road cyclists. Although we all agreed on that topic, none of us were actually passionate about that topic. Since none of us were really passionate about that topic, during our initial research stages, we procrastinated a lot. This lead to our work being backlogged. Because of the backlog of work that we had, we eventually had to rush through a lot of things which caused us to be a little frustrated which also created some misunderstandings between the three of us. But nonetheless, we managed to press on and complete the assignment with anyone getting injured.

To me the root of the problem was that none of us could agree on a single issue. I can understand that, as the three of us were very different people and had very different interests. I feel that we made a wrong choice by arbitrarily choosing a topic just so that all of us could agree on it. I feel that it would have been much better if each of us could somehow take the time to really show how much passion we had for our own topics, which could probably have interested the other members of the group too.  This would have been a better alternative rather than the path we chose. What do you guys think?