Critical Reflection

Module Learning:

This module has been incredibly eventful and helpful to me. At the start of the module, I remembered I had weak presentation skills and thus would often stutter when I am speaking in front of a crowd. With the opportunity that Professor Brad has given to me, I was almost practicing my presentation skills every week and that really helped me improve a lot.

The 7C’s of Communication also improved my presentation skills. During the weekly mini presentations, even though I had done this a few times, I was still stuttering a lot while presenting. This makes my presentation very confusing as others are not able to understand what I said. With the help of the 7Cs, my presentation was clear and complete. I did not stutter as much and was able to deliver the presentation smoothly. There will definitely be more presentations to come along the way, be it being studies or work. The 7C’s of Communication is a skill I can hold on to and implement for my future presentations.

I also learned how to cite sources properly. Although we did reports back in polytechnics, this technical report was a lot more in depth. We did not have to care much about the citations compared to now. From this module, I have learned that we have to credit the writers for their work and thus we have to cite the sources properly. Professor Brad taught us how to cite them properly and now I am able to implement this into the other reports that will come during my time in SIT.

One thing I find to be very useful was the peer reviews we did for most of the assignments. Peer reviews allow us to learn from each other. The critical and constructive feedback I received really helped me in improving the standard of my work.

Project Learning:

Coming up with the idea for our research project was a difficult task. We have to think about how to improve of a product from an engineer’s point of view. In other words, we need to critically think about the product’s mechanical features and how to improve on it. We had a lot of discussions and ultimately came up with an idea. Since a lot of discussions were going on to choose the idea we want to work on, we had to implement good communication skills so that our ideas get across to each other clearly without any confusion.

Teamwork plays a part in the project as well. As all of us have different working style, it was quite difficult to adjust to everyone. Some like to do their work fast, some like to do it when it is near the deadline. Slowly, we adjusted to everyone’s style and managed to write a technical report.

For the presentation, I was glad that we had a mock presentation as I was not prepared at all for the real one. During the mock presentation, I blanked out for a while as I was not mentally prepared. The feedbacks I received from my classmates were also useful in helping me prepare for the actual presentation.

In the future projects that I will do, I will be implementing what I learnt from this research project. I will be an effective communicator, making sure my ideas get across to my groupmates. I will also be a team player in all the other projects that I will be doing, making sure the team is able to work together smoothly.