Emerging from the cocoon; Metamorphosis

Time flies. The last semester of university life has concluded for me, and I am so glad ES2007S was part of this 'grand' exit.

Looking back into the middle of the semester; we chose our project groups, and I teamed up with Bernadette, Caleb and Johnny. I had worked with Bernadette during our peer teaching assignment, and found that she was a joy to work with. I was not as familiar to Caleb and Johnny unlike Bernadette, but with their humorous ways, I felt part of the team in no time at all.

During the first class session, we got down to work immediately and chose sustainable future as the broad topic to work on. We threw ideas at each other. Bernadette had some experience with pneumatic chutes so we started to gravitate towards the idea of using these chutes for a cleaner and greener Singapore in the long run. Face-to-face interactions are not a problem for our group. Ideas were heard and discussed with earnest.

We also started work on our wiki, and posted our first Gantt chart there. We agreed to take this work home and do literature research on the current practices of recycling in Singapore.

Everyone kept to the Gantt chart; by the next meeting, we had all the ideas backed up with statistics and background research. We explored further into the ideas of implementing laws and education...Initially, we used Gmail as a form of communication but due to the lag time in email correspondence, we switched to SMS-ing as it was a faster and more efficient way of getting information across.

By the 3rd meeting, we realised that nus wiki was not the best platform for us to share our documents as it was messy, and laggy at times. What made things worse was that it had many 'maintanence' slots that interrupted our progress. As such, the team agreed to using Dropbox, and only upload the updated documents into wiki for sharing purposes with the class and tutor.

We proceeded on with sharing our write ups for the proposal into Dropbox. Everything went smoothly except for the fact that dropbox does not discern 2 users editing at the same time (unlike Google docs) so sometimes there will be conflicting copies of the document... We solved that problem by informing the group whenever one of us is editing the document. Another way we used was to save a separate copy in the computer itself and edit from there before uploading it into Dropbox and renaming it "edited by...".

Soon, we printed and submitted our proposal.

Work began on crafting our ppt slides. As we had a lot of content, we had to figure out how to convince our audience (URA) as far as possible without being too wordy. Again, Dropbox was used and we edited our allocated slides accordingly.

Everything went smooth, and we had our dry run. After that, we continued to improve on our slides with the feedback from our peers and tutor. Dropbox was really a very useful tool. It was simple to use and easy to access. We got our final version of slides up and ready by the weekend.

In a nutshell, I believe that our team worked really well together. We had good team dynamics, and every team member really listens to everyone's input before giving suggestions etc.

From ES2007S, I have really learnt a lot. From simple and clear verbal communication skills, to effective team work and good presentation skills. I am really glad I took up the 'challenge' to take ES2007S, and now, I will graduate with these skills forever with me. With my new-found awareness, I will continuously improve myself and work towards attaining better communication skills every day.

Additional note on my FYP presentation: It went great! I rehearsed in front of the mirror, rehearsed inside my head before I slept (early)... jitters aside, I presented with ease and confidence and spoke really clearly and smoothly! Thank you Dr Jaidev and EVERYONE from class! The oral presentation skills learnt in ES2007S came in the nick of time!