Me, Myself and I

At first, I thought how hard can a 100 word bio data of myself be. In the end, I spent almost 4 hours churning this out...enough said.

I grew up in a city that advocates meritocracy, efficiency and conformity. Those values combined with my education have shaped me into a determined, organized, conscientious and independent individual. I believe in doing things right the first time and constantly refreshing one’s knowledge to keep abreast of our expanding world. Although my dominant traits have the makings of a good researcher, my dream since secondary school, I am still humbly learning from experienced university lecturers now. Eventually I envision myself to be a well-loved researcher cum lecturer who is enthusiastic in pushing the frontiers of life science and imparting valuable knowledge to students. (101 words)

Looking forward to all your comments!

Reflections...

It’s too rushed! This project has been a pain in the ass since it started; every step of the report was done in such a limited amount of time! Probably it’s the way I do things, but I just feel very time-constrained in every step of the project. This module has got to have the most workload as compared to any of the modules I’ve taken so far in NUS.

However, having complained, I have discovered much about the importance of planning workflow through this project. When our group was working on combining each of our parts, I realized that it was tough. The reason being that we did our own parts by ourselves without discussing much with each other. Hence we had a hard time in making sure that our whole essay had the same tone and style. I learned that we could meet up more frequently for short meetings (2-3hrs) to complete a single task instead of having long meetings (>8hrs) to accomplish many tasks simultaneously.

Long meetings tend to exhaust an individual exponentially against time. Thought processes will also be snuffed out by the long hours of excruciating work. Any wonderful ideas will be impeded by the exhaustion leading to a creation of a dull project. Short meetings would be the opposite and gives the individual adequate time to think through a single task. Since exhaustion would not have taken place, it provides additional time frame for the member to think through the task at its own pace.

There are many details that I have picked up in terms of communication in a group. I suppose it’s because of the way this module is structured; we tend to focus more on professionally bringing across our ideas. Through this path, I unknowingly changed the way I bring across ideas and my thought process to my group members. It’s rather difficult to really pinpoint these changes; I jus know it is changed for the better.

All in all, planning an integrated workflow, setting short meetings and some improvement in my communication was what I learned through this report writing. Although I would need more practices of such nature to sharpen my tools, I hope these skills that I have learned will be applicable when I am working in the future.