In the end...

4 reasons why you SHOULD take up ES2007S:

1. It is a seriously FUN module (minus the hectic deadlines)

I have enjoyed myself this past 13 weeks, even though it has been a whirlwind of lessons and application of various skills. It is definitely not your typical module. The activities in class are interactive and interesting. I especially liked the part of being peer taught. I felt that we could relate better to the lessons, having our peers go through the lessons with us. Furthermore, it made the lessons more alive with the various activities that each peer teaching group had prepared.

2. It’ll hone your professional skills

It is the first time that I have actually done a presentation in NUS. Prior to this, my presentation experiences encompassed of only one other formal presentation in JC. Furthermore, it was also the first time where we had to limit the number of words on the visual aids. This put on more pressure on me to know my content better as I would not have any back up on screen.
Adding to that, there were resume and cover letter writing practices, which I found very useful. Also, the interview process topped off the entire ‘stuff to do to get hired’ process. I am one to fret whenever there I have to attend an interview. In fact, I abhor interviews. But this interview process was fun and gave me an insight to what interviewers might be looking out for during an interview and this would help prepare me for interviews in the future.

3. You’ll make loads of friends (:

Initially, I was rather skeptical about being placed randomly in groups to carry out our proposal. This brought me out of my comfort zone, and I had to adapt to working with ‘strangers’. But I must say, it has been one of the best experiences during the course. Not only did I make more friends, but it brought the entire class together. Now, I can confidently say that I would be more open to working with people whom I am unfamiliar with in the future.

4. And of course! You’ll learn communication skills!

How hard could communication skills be? That was what I assured myself while bidding for this module. Boy! Could I ever be more wrong? It has been a hectic 13 weeks of learning and applying the various skills. This module encompasses so many communication skills and there was so little time to teach every single one in depth. We breezed through the various topics week after week. And then work started pouring in; we had to prepare for the peer teaching, proposal writing and finally oral presentation. All these projects incorporated many communication skills in them. Ranging from oral to listening skills, there was a constant exposure to these skills that it was more or less ingrained in us.

Reflections

I woke up this morning with butterflies in my stomach knowing that it was the big day of the presentation. My lines were flashing past my head. Even whilst walking to school, I was reciting my lines, just to ingrain them in my memory.

10:00 am: Brad said that we had another 5 minutes to go up to present. I shall not panic. I shall not panic.

10:03 am: Oh my gosh! What have I gotten myself into?

10:05 am: Let’s just get this show on the road.

10:30 am: It is finally over!! * Breathes a huge sigh of relief*

Haha. The oral presentation has been like hanging like a ominous cloud over my head ever since the proposal was due two weeks ago. Not only that, it has been a hectic two weeks of intensive preparation for the presentation, slides to finish up, recommendations to come up with, writing our lines and the NEVER-ENDING need to edit our slides. Now that it’s over, I can finally look back and say it was worth it all :P

Throughout the presentation, I made an effort to vary my tone whist presenting so that it would not become too monotonous. By doing so, I wanted to make my argument more compelling as well and emphasize on the problem and how the recommendations could help. Furthermore, I tried to stand in front of the audience and draw their attention to me too. This was out of my comfort zone I must admit, to thrust myself into the center of attention. This was aided further by trying to maintain eye contact with the audience. Although I admit, I was a bit unnerved at first. But I wanted to bring my points across to the audience and make them feel like they were part of this discussion and not just an onlooker. Also, since I wanted the audience to be focusing their attention to me. I tried as little as possible to refer to the slides. Lastly, I tried to pace and slow my speech as well as articulate it to allow the audience to digest the information given to them.

One major part which I can improve on would be to do away with cue cards. Unlike Deenise and Shih Han, I felt that I had to hold some cue cards as a form of security, just in case I forgot any point while presenting and start panicking midway. Furthermore, when I took over the presentation from Kellyn, I was so nervous that I had to refer to my cue cards at the beginning when my mind went blank. But further into the presentation, I got into the flow of giving the presentation and didn’t need to refer to the cue cards anymore. But there were sometimes where I had to pause to gather my thoughts. But, I must say that I still need more practice in this area. Also, previously it was brought up that my voice tends to waver towards the end. I hope that my voice didn’t waver at the end though. Although I still need to practice on voice projection.

Legally Blonde: Thanks girls for all your hard work! For all the suggestions made on how to improve our presentation and for taking time out of your busy schedules and being there for all the meetings (:

Analysis of Interview with Undergraduate Draft 1

Write up for interview

We interviewed On Chun Wee Derek, a third year law student from the National University of Singapore to find out his view on communication skills and if NUS Law faculty is able to bring across to students the important communication skills needed while practicing law. The basis of this interview was to further clarify certain aspects of observation gathered from responses to our survey. Secondly, we believe that by holding an interview with a current student, we can find out the current modules and teaching styles employed by law professors. Moreover, we would like to find out if the message of certain communication skills that the professors want to teach, effectively brought across to students.

One of the questions which we posed to him was, ‘Are internships are the only way to learn communication skills?’ He told us that internships were the only way to practice communication skills such as listening, intercultural and interpersonal skills. This was because in law school the students do not have the opportunity to interact with client. Although, professors would remind them time and again that to be a good lawyer, they need to have good communication skills. However, he pointed out that even during internships, interns do not get to interact directly with clients. They mostly take minutes of meetings their mentors have with clients and from there observe and learn how these qualified lawyers practice active listening and relating their clients situation in a law framework.

However, he clarified that to deal with the lack of practice of communication with clients in fresh graduates. Firms do have a contract training period of one year with new employees. This contract training period would then consist of six months of studying for the bar exam, which law students have to pass to practice law, and for the remaining six months these new employees would be under the mentorship and guidance of an experienced lawyer. During this mentorship period, new lawyers are guided on how to handle cases by their mentors. And their meetings with clients are always held in the presence of the mentor.

We wanted to find out what teaching methods were employed by professors in various courses to teach communication skills. He said that for legal research, the school subscribes to various law databases to allow students to carry out investigations to build up cases. On the other hand, there are not a lot of role playing done in courses, and may be limited to mediation and child and advocacy where students role play. This may give a wrong response to the situation as the students themselves do know how to answer in a legalistic manner.

Lastly, we wanted to find out if students were willing to undertake a module specializing in communication skills. He brought up an important point that students would benefit from such a module. However, he is worried on how the course would be graded as a communication course is subjective and very hard to assess. Hence, he felt that to make it a pass/fail course may draw students to be interested in the course.

Methodology- Survey Draft 1

Survey

Survey for NUS Law undergraduates and graduates

The purpose of the undergraduate survey was to understand more about the current curriculum of the NUS law school and try to identify the various communication skills thatcurrent law students felt were inadequately covered. As for the NUS law graduates survey, we aim to identify the communication skills which are vital and highly valued in the law industry.

We sent out the link for the survey of NUS law undergraduate to our friends while link for the graduate survey was sent to clubs such as the NUS law alumni and the Law Association. However, we only managed to obtain 93 respondents for the undergraduate survey and 3 respondents for the graduate survey. Hence, this data that we have collected regarding the communication needs of the law industry may not be representative of the whole pool of law undergraduate and graduate students. More extensive research is required to fully understand the communication needs of the entire law industry.

Our first survey targeted NUS Law undergraduates, as we wanted to find out the opinion of current NUS Law undergraduates with respect to communication skills being taught in NUS. We chose to target all levels of current NUS Law undergraduate.The survey was created online through the surveymonkey.com survey platform. This platform was chosen as most of our survey participants would have internet access and they would be able to answer the survey at a more convenient time and place. Furthermore, surveymonkey.com allows for easy tabulation of the survey results and generates pie charts. Our group approached the target audience through email, explaining what the purpose of the survey was and directing them to the survey via a link. Due to time constraints, the survey was aim to target around 15 to 20 respondents. Our group liaised contacts through some friends in the Law faculty and through the Law faculty student exchange programme.

The second survey was created to cater to NUS Law undergraduates who have graduated. This was to find out their perspective of communication needs in the law industry. This was to allow us to compare what law students thought of communication skills to lawyers in the workplace. And this would allow us to find out what communication skills the NUS Law faculty needs to focus on. Likewise, this survey was created online through the surveymonkey.com survey platform. This would facilitate easy collation of results as well as being able to reach out to larger audience of NUS Law alumni online. We posted the survey link on law alumni facebook groups, and explained the purpose of our survey. Another approach to disseminate the survey was to ask the Law alumni relations officer for help regarding forwarding the request for survey email to respective alumni members.

The questions for both surveys were structured in three different answering formats. Firstly, some were closed formats, with only yes and no answers. Secondly, some questions allowed multiple answers such as question (see appendix). Others were more open styled, having respondents rate the value of certain communication skills. Most of the questions had a ‘Not Applicable’ option to allow respondents to have a way to not have to answer a question. As well as an ‘other’ option to allow them in input other skills not covered. We started out with broad based questions such as ‘Have you had any internship experience?’ and ‘What is/was the job scope?’ This allows to respondents to warm up to the survey. After which we narrowed our focus to communication skills, and what is the value of various communication skills to them and how the NUS Law faculty facilitates the learning of these skills. Careful consideration was taken when phrasing the questions. This was to avoid leading and loaded questions which could potentially influence respondents’ answers.

This is so jokes

This is just another anecdote to further iterate my points in the post below.

During the weekend, I met up with a close friend who recently returned from her exchange program from Toronto. As we talked, the topic of intercultural communication crept up and I was asking her if there were any problems faced when she communicated with the Canadians. She informed me that initially the Canadian students could not understand her Singaporean accent when she spoke, so she learnt to speak slower when talking to her Canadian friends and tried to articulate he words more. She told me that she felt that in Singapore, we tend to roll out words without actually articulating them correctly and precisely.

A term which Canadians use commonly was 'funny'. They would say it in passing when talking to others, like 'you're so funny' even though the speaker had not talked about anything funny. At the beginning, my friend was quite upset whenever someone said that to her because she thought that it meant weird. In Singapore, we usually say 'you're so funny' when the speaker has actually made a joke or when we imply that the speaker is weird and random. However, further interaction with her friends she came to realize that the phrase wasn't meant for her to take it personally, as it was just an interjection to show that they are listening.

Another term which was commonly used was 'jokes'. Apparently my friend had organized a dinner party and had invited some of her Canadian friends over. The dinner was great and company awesome, and they all had a very good time. The next day, one of her guests came up to her in school and declared that the dinner was such a jokes dinner. My friend was insulted thinking that her guest meant that the dinner was a joke, and that it was horrible. She then tried to ask her friend what went wrong at the dinner party and all, this led to her friend clarifying with her that 'jokes' meant fun and enjoyable. So in fact, it was an entertaining dinner.

I guess there is no hard and fast rule to what different words mean in different societies. And if everyone applies the 3 tips featured in the last post, we probably could lessen the chances of being insulted and insulting others.

Something on the lighter side :)

When in China...

During the recent holidays I vacationed in China, and was struck by their different cultural norms. In Singapore, it is often normal to hear people address a female stranger as ‘xiao jie’, by which we mean ‘miss’. In fact, we hear it everywhere - in food courts, markets, shops, basically anywhere having salesgirls. When we were in Shanghai, my family was ordering food in a restaurant. My aunt wanted a menu and addressed the waitress as ‘xiao jie’, as we are used to in Singapore. This brought the waitress over but she seemed very unhappy and her demeanor, sulky. We did not know what to make of it and just wrote it off as poor service.

Later on in the tour bus, the tour guide informed us that while it is common to call service personnel in Singapore ‘xiao jie’, it is considered rude in China to call not only their service personnel but anyone ‘xiao jie’ as it means prostitute. If we needed to address the service personnel, it was more appropriate to say ‘fu wu ren yuan’, which means service staff. After hearing what the tour guide said, we had to watch our tongue whenever we called for service staff and tried not to lapse back into our habit of saying ‘xiao jie’.

This situation could potentially have been a larger conflict which fortunately did not escalate. This situation ended up very different from the one reported in The New Paper, which ended up in a brawl with the police having to be called in (for more information please see: http://forums.sgclub.com/singapore/excuse_me_xiao_157317.html).

I think there are a few things we could learn from the above situations.

1. It takes two hands to clap: both parties should be understanding and not bear grudges if a certain ‘rude’ action or word is used. The offended party should not be too quick to anger, whereas the offending party should take a step back and try to understand where the offended party is coming from. I believe both parties have to listen to both sides of the story before proceeding with a judgment.

2. When in Rome, do as the Romans do: even though it is such a cliché, I believe that when people are placed in different cultures, we should learn to adapt and not cling on desperately to our own customs. By doing so, we would seem less stand-offish, and it would cheer the natives that we are making an effort to integrate with them and assimilate their culture. When unsure of what to do and what the norms are, asking and clarification is the best way to go.

3. Never assume: Most gestures or phrases do not have the same meaning worldwide. Most of the time we assume that what is acceptable to us would be acceptable to others, and gestures and words are universally understood throughout the world. However, we should remember that the world is made up of people from all walks of life, and everyone sees things differently. Never assume, it makes an ‘ASS out of U and ME’ :)

Position Application Letter Draft #3

Blk 12 Pizza Street

#12-34

Singapore 567890

3rd February 2010

Singapore Zoo

80 Mandai Rd,

Singapore729826
Tel: + 65 6269 3411

Dear Sir/ Madam,

Junior Animal Management Officer

I am enclosing my resume in response to your advertisement for the above post which appeared on the Singapore Zoo website on 1st December 2009.

I have recently graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with a Bachelor of Science degree in Life Science (Specialization in Biology). I consider that the study of Biology appropriate for the above post, particularly the course on Life form and function which explores the development of animals and plants. This module has allowed me to understand the various types of plants and animals and their various functions, which I believe is vital for this job. Moreover, I have handling animal experience as I have carried out research on animal behaviour. In addition, I am trained in writing scientific reports, which I consider essential for the job. Besides my academic studies for the past three years, I have also worked part time as a music teacher and a private tuition teacher. I feel that this demonstrates my ability to maintain dedication, motivation and enthusiasm for a project over a long period of time.

Studying at NUS gave me the opportunity to go to Toronto for a summer program, and being alone overseas has taught me to adapt to different circumstances and it has built my confidence in networking with people. Furthermore, being vice-director for an event organized by the Outdoor Activities Club in NUS, I had to liaise with various companies for sponsorship and recruit members into the event. This has helped me work on and improve my interpersonal communication skills as well as leadership skills. In addition, working as both piano teacher and tuition teacher has taught me responsibility in terms of taking charge of my students’ studies and finding the initiative to develop new ways of teaching to interest them. All these I trust would be very valuable for the job.

From reading your press releases I am assured that your work with wildlife, as well as conservation efforts is highly regarded in the community. I understand that the zoo is moving towards an open educational concept aimed to effectively convey facts about the animals and messages about wildlife conservation. Which I have a passion for conservation and hope that I would be able to make a difference in society together with your company. I am willing to go out of my way to widen my knowledge in conservation as well as animal management. I believe that the post of junior animal management officer would be worthwhile and challenging and am eager to learn valuable skills to make a difference in your company. I hope that you will look favourably at my application.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Miss Tiffany Seow