Final Reflection on Learning:D

I have learnt a lot through the module ES2007S professional communication. What benefit me most is not the theories regarding to effective communication, but the practical skills I have obtained, such as oral presentation skills, competence in working in a group project and the competitiveness in a job interview. The most useful skill I have learnt during this course is how to effectively and successfully present "myself" to employer during job seeking. 

As a final year student, job seeking is critical for my future life. A good resume/CV is first step towards success. Learnt from the peer teaching, I now understand that we should always emphasize our strength using positive vocabulary  In addition, we should try to use numbers and solid result to demonstrate our ability and competence rather than just give a general description. 

I have also learnt that cover letter plays a vital role in determining whether we will get the job interview or not. The cover letter should re-emphasis the requirements listed by companies and talk about the qualities which is not covered in the CV or resume.

Mock interview is the my favourite part in the curriculum of ES2007S. It provides the opportunity to simulate the real situation happened during interview. I believe that it certainly prepared us better for the future job interview. Madam Fazilah and other observers gave me valuable comments arranging from my attire to my body language. Thank you for your help in improving my interview skills. 

Studying ES2007 is a wonderful and fulfilling journey for me. Our tutor, Madam Fazilah dedicate to teach us in very effective way and all of my classmates are very friendly and active during the class. I especially want to thank my project group members: Jin yuan, Isabel and John, who are always friendly and helpful. I hope that our friendship will last along with the knowledge and memory acquired during this module ES2007S. 

Reflection on Oral Presentation

                                                       

I used to do presentation with a script in my hand due to lacking of confidence. The script in my hand didn't really relief my nervousness, but put me in the struggle between reading it or "delivery" it. I am happy that I got rid of script this time. In fact, I purposely didn't write detailed script but rather a brief outline. As the result, I forced myself to delivery our proposal in my own words. Although my oral presentation is far from perfect, I believe that my presentation skills had improved as I could share my ideas freely without memorizing every line on the script.

During the presentation, I think that my body language assisted my speech effectively. In my opinion, good body language will come naturally when we have the desire to share knowledge and understanding to audiences. Hence, the presenter must have the interest in what he/she is talking about in order to have the enthusiasm to influence others. Our topic " integration foreign and local student" intrigue my interest, which is probably the reason that leads to proper hand and body gesture.

I tried to use my personal experiences to convince the audience. For instance, I used my unpleasant personal experience about FOC to demonstrate that including foreigners in FOC is beneficial and important for international students.

Overall, my oral presentation is satisfactory. However, there exist two main problems. First, during the presentation, I was a little bit confused by the composition of audiences. I cannot find appropriate vocabulary or delivery methods to satisfy both undergraduate students and Ms. Lim, who is the VP of OSA. If only Ms Lim was there,  I would use very formal way of presentation. On the other hand, if only undergraduate student were there, I would try to use a bit humour to engage them. My second problem lies in my control of language. As a non-native English speaker, my pronunciation and choice of the words are not clear and precise enough.

Lastly, I want to thank my group members: Jin yuan, Isabel and John. They helped my a lot throughout the preparation of the oral presentation :D

Intercultural Behavior

In 2010, I got a summer job in Connecticut, United States. I worked as a waiter in a natural resort.

I noticed that customers were very friendly and showed their fullest respect to me. One the other hand, most of my American colleges, who were also waiters, never felt that their work is lower compared to white-collars. However, It isn't the case in China. Most Chinese seems only show respect to people with high-end job. At the same time, many waiters and other low income workers in China accept such unequal social status.

In my opinion, such phenomena is caused by the culture and history. As we know, US is a country in which individual human right is highly valued. On the other hand, although China on the way to democracy, the deep rooted hierarchy idea hasn't been extirpated completely due to the long history of feudal dynasty.
Understanding the culture difference and the reason is very important to facilitate communication and enhance relationship between people from difference culture.

Cover letter

 Since, I am going to apply for graduate school recently, I post a personal statement instead of cover letter.The function of personal statement in application of graduate school is similar to the cover letter in application of a job. However, the structure and formate of the personal statement is completely different.




Apply for School of Engineering and Medicine, Stanford

http://bioengineering.stanford.edu/education/admissions.html

Personal Statement: 

I often have “crazy ideas”.

Holding a glass tube of my own DNA extracted in the kitchen (learned from Youtube), I can’t help but think: it is this DNA that determines my characteristics and physical shape. However, is the trajectory of my life also defined by the sequences of nucleotides? The answer is obvious: No. Regardless how elegantly hereditary information is stored in DNA, it is not enough to convey all the identities of my unique personality.

I start to purify my DNA by tuning the concentration of salt (NaCl) to 0.14M. Suddenly, the tube becomes a timeless zone where my past, present my future appear spontaneously at different layers of liquid. Though different aspects of me are intertwined together in the tube, I see 4 floating words there which made me special.

Curiosity! I am constantly curious about mysteries of science and the beauty of nature. My father used to wonder: why did his son ask for an encyclopaedic book “Hundred thousand whys” at age of 9, instead of a fairytale book. My high school teachers don’t understand why this student spent most of his extracurricular time on investigating the influence of metallic liquid leaked from battery on moina macrocopa(a genus of crustaceans), which seems far deviated from what they taught in class. My project supervisor was surprised that her student worked until midnight on weekends to find out how E. Coli immobilized on graphene based sensor response to different external stimuli. I have a simple answer for those queries and doubts: passion for unknown. Finding a reason behind a phenomena or solving a knotty question fulfils my curiosity and motivate my further research.

     

Creativity! I think creativity frequently comes from incorporation of knowledge from different disciplines or research fields. It is especially true for bioengineering due to its multidisciplinary nature. During my internship in a research institute, I was involved in project related to cell enrichment using mircrofilters. One day, I had a crazy idea: following similar trapping mechanism, why can’t we use capillary flow in an open system so that we can isolate single cell and “fix” them in microtraps? With careful experimentation, my crazy idea turn into reality and I fabricated a prototype for high throughput single cell sorting platform for drug screening and other scientific studies. My creativity is not limited to research; I like to find new approaches and apply them in my daily life. For instance, I invented three interesting swimming styles: submarine style, jellyfish style and polar bear style.

Persistence! I developed a deep enthusiasm in the field of bioengineering. Even though I have encountered enormous obstacles and sometimes suffered huge pressure in pursuing my professional goal, my determination and persistence did not corrode. The most difficult period in my entire life was in my sophomore year in university. I had the privilege to write a critical review about graphene based chemical and biosensors. In order to make the review timely, I spent an average of 5 hours per day besides my heavy course load and extracurricular activity, investing into reading about 500 research articles, making notes for each paper, summarizing and discussing with my mentor. When I was frustrated by elusive concepts or lengthy paper, I switch the aspect of viewing problem. Similar to windsurfing, “storms” makes me stronger and advances faster. All my effort and persistence paid off in the end and the review paper was published in Chemical Society Review.          

Sociable! I enjoy talking with people with different background, especially about the topic of cutting edge technology. Learnt from 2 years of research experience, I believe effective communication plays the most important role in disseminating innovations and inspiring new ideas. I maintained good relationship with PHD students and my professors in school and my colleges and supervisor during internship in an institute. The good relationship in return facilitates my learning as they treat me as friend and hence are willing to teach me. In addition, many brilliant ideas come out during discussion with them in the laboratory. As the welfare director in the student union, I use soft leadership to unite people. Two of my committee members even tell me “you smile too much and you do not seem like a leader”. I like to smile and feel that it is the most beauty language connecting each other.

My DNA solution reflects iridescent color when I place the glass tube under the sunlight. There, my future reveals: after giving lecture to students, I come to my neurologic laboratory and experiment with assay containing in a glass tube, which is also a key to neurologic diseases.  

Interpersonal conflicts

I am a placid and friendly person and seldom had interpersonal conflicts with other people. However, When I was in my second year studying in university, I fail to maintain a good relationship with my roomie.

At first, we got along with each other very well. Gradually, I found that he seemed locking himself in his own world. Every time when I saw him, his brows were knitted. I felt that he was trying to distance me. In addition, I was busy with my CCA and school project at that time. Hence, I neither chatted with him much.

One day, he started to play video games until midnight. It was a kind of game similar to "Need for Speed" and it generated much noise. I am very sensitive to noise and can't sleep at all. What's worse, I had an important presentation the next day morning. Therefore, I told him to lower down the volume in a polite way and he did it. However, I could sense his unwillingness from his voice.

Since then, cold war break and we never talk to each other for a few month except  "please lower down the volume"

Deprivation of sleep is the most intolerable for a person with regular daily schedules like me. Once, he kept doing that even when I was sick. I was so pissed off and did something stupid by posting some attacking words on a local forum with his name specified.

Somehow he found out my post and we had a serious quarrel. During the quarrel, I found out that he played video game with loud noise to relieve his frustration accumulated from job searching. He was in bad mood every time when I ask him to low down his volume. In addition, he felt 12 o'clock is still considered early, so he think my complain is very annoying (he usually slept at 4am).  After emotional eruption,  we talked through and solved the problem. We found that the problem was amplified because we fail to think on other's side.

What would you do if you are in my situation?

Effective communication matters

Communication played an indispensable role in the history of civilization. It even comes before the existence of language. Just think about this: how primitive human inform their companions that there are myriad of food across the mountain? Possibly, they could used body language or just screaming to each others. However, one thing for sure is that they were trying their best to communicate effectively. In my view, it is the desire of effective communication deeply embedded in our soul that stimulated the emerging of language and further exploration of various of communication channels. Apart from its importance for human beings as a whole, effective communication matters in every way of my daily life. To be successful or even survival in our increasingly competitive society, it is essential to understand and practice effective communication skills.

It is important to apply effective communication skills to maintain our relationship with other people, our classmates, colleagues, friends and family members. I am a introvert, so the hurdle of communication in front of me is to speak out. I naturally don't like to talk much and especially talk with strangers. At the same time, I notice that some people just talk too much and control the conversation all the time. Both cases are wrong. The balance between listening and speaking should be tuned according to the context of conversation. It is very important factor which facilitate the high quality conversation. If one constantly felt that his friend is dominant in conversation giving no chance for him to express his own opinion or, on the contrary, is reluctant to respond, their friendship can never last long. 

In addition, whether our communication is effective or not, to a large extent, determines the advancement of our future career. Indeed, effective communication skill is essential at the beginning stage of our career. How do we present ourselves nicely in job application letter? How well do we "sell" ourselves in the interview? All this will determine the success rate of getting a desired job. When we get into workplace, the relationship with colleges, clients, boss influences our effectiveness of working and our mood. For instance, If I constantly think the boss coerce me to do something that beyond my ability and I choose to hide my feeling with my communication channel closed,  my productivity might decrease due to the heavy emotional burden. Consequently, I may give a bad impression to my boss, which is devastating to my future career. However, it is not difficult to reverse the situation by communicating with him in an appropriate way. An appropriate way include good communication channel, body language, timing and content of conversation, which may vary depending on different context.

In short, effective communication is not only essential in maintaining our relationship but also important for our career. We should never overlook the significance of effective communication skills. Only through practising those skills that we learned in the textbooks or from our life experience, can we connect to the world in a better way.