Final Reflection

Looking back to the first post, I wrote the reasons why the effective communication skills are important as the essentiality of them to achieve my own goals. And I stated three examples.

Although basically I haven’t changed the idea, I have clearer image about it now than at the start point of this module.

As I wrote in a version of my bio-data, ultimately I would like to enjoy my life as much as possible through the interaction with diverse people, struggling to change what I don’t like in the world. To achieve it, I think I have to recognize that every single moment have something to do with communication in that we cannot live without others. For example, to get along well with roommates by spontaneous routine cleaning, to convey the order to the gaffer in food court near my house and so forth.

 

As such, what I learned in this module was really meaningful. Although actually I may have unconsciously recognized most of the knowledge about the effective communication, through the classes using skill builders and sharing opinions/experiences with other students, I identified them consciously and practically in greater detail. That is the fruits of all the effort in this module for me.

However, one thing that I would like to warn myself is, to have knowledge is one thing and to apply it in real life is another. In fact, unlike in this module, I could not get along well with group members of another research work. Maybe it was easy to have good communication in this module because all the classmates have high consciousness in effective communication during this class. This class will end soon but the chances to apply the experiences in this module take place here and there all the time. Thus, from now on, it is really important for me to keep the high recognition in effective communication until I can acquire true skills.

 

Lastly, I thank the lecturer, Ms. Fiona Richardson, who guided us to the goal of this module as well as all the classmates, who gave me the valuable opinions to me.

Draft of Biodata

This is my draft for biodata.

I am a 4th year student at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and major in chemical engineering. I am now studying at National University of Singapore as an exchange student. I was born and bred in Gumma prefecture, Japan. As for part-time job, I had worked for preparatory school and English pub in Japan.

I have joined variety of activities in university including environmental society (doing president from 2007) as well as abundant travel experiences mainly around Asia.

I has longed for working for UN some day. My current interests are international development and environmental policy and thinking of join internship at relevant NGO.

Alternatively, a bit more casual version are bellow.

I am a 4th year student at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and major in chemical engineering. I am now studying at NUS as an exchange student. As for part-time job, I had worked for preparatory school and English pub.

I have joined variety of activities in university as well including environmental society (doing president from 2007).

I do things in my own way. According to the voices of my friends, I am a confident, friendly, inquisitive, rational, reflective person. My hobbies are sports, movies, traveling, taking photos and karaoke.

My current interests are international development and environmental policy and long for working for UN some day.

Which do you think is better? Do you have any comments?

What I learned from writing official report

Through writing report in the class with two other NUS students, I could learn lots of things. There are two major points.

 

Firstly, I got the general skills to write official report.

Actually, writing official report itself was the first experience to me and I felt it was hard but really meaningful as well. I have once made questionnaire research about students’ recognition of garbage separation and the distribution of dust bins as one of the activities of Environmental society in my home university. I wrote research analysis in order to tell the results to university officials with my society member but it was quite imperfect. I am sure now that I can write more appropriate and appealing report.

 

Secondly, I have become to understand what the effective communication is like in writing reports.

First of all, I realized that making the most of  backgrounds of each member is very important. Talking about the research topic (career guidance in the university education) with two Singapore students made me realize the difference of the situation in Japan and Singapore. For example, the timing of securing the job is different; most of the Japanese university undergraduates are going to get an unofficial approval from the company about one year before their graduation, whereas, for NUS students, it was not until only several months before they graduate from university or even after the graduation that they secure the job. Such a findings can make an analysis more penetrating.

In addition to that, I found some points to be improved to get the effective communication in writing. As to me, most needed reform is the promptitude of the response. The delay of response cause the decline in the quality of report in that it shorten the time for editing again and put heavier demand for other members.

As a group, it may have been needed more to keep the objectivity of the analysis. We could interpret the survey result as more beneficial to us, but it lowers the credibility of the report and would not helpful for all in the long run.

 

From what I learnt in writing official report as I stated above, I believe that I can communicate more effectively in making writings in the rest of years as student and my future career. 

Evaluating Intercultural Behavior

I like traveling abroad and often talk or negotiate with local people in souvenir shop, hostel and taxi /motorcycle/bike driver. The interesting point is that the friendliness and way of negotiation varies between countries.

For example, Nepalese people are honest (same as Japan) and never try to cheat. It means they tell the true price in the first place and seem to have no secret intention. They are similar to Japanese people in a way and I felt comfortable.

 

In contrast, in India, most of the people who try to talk with me are cheater and tell me the price about 3 times higher than the usual price but they are so friendly that its hard to distinguish the true friendship from superficial one(I heard Chinese way of negotiation is similar). For example, it is quite common that one man brings me to their friend shop and asks them to sell the souvenir in discount price for me. But in the situation like this, the price is still steep in most cases.

In my opinion, however, Indian people are naturally really friendly and like to talk with anyone else because India is so crowded that they can’t help communicate frequently to get along with neighbors. 

For example, when I was joining the local one-day tour in Delhi, many other local participants spoke to me and they were nice guys. Actually, I exchanged email addresses with them and many other people in India.

Another symbolic thing is that they call me “my friend”, even I met them a few minutes ago. In fact, they talk and behave as friend with me. What I surprised was that many people asked for giving one of my pen for the memory; one guide asked for even my t-shirt. It’s partly because they are not so better off as people in developed countries. However, the conversation itself was really fun as they talk with me as friend.

 

In conclusion, we had better know the general nationality of various countries and be careful not to misunderstand their friendliness in order neither to be cheated nor to ignore their true friendship. 

Potential Research Project Topic

My suggestion for the research project topic is “Organic Foods”.

Today, reducing environmental impacts of every individual has getting greater importance for the human beings to achieve the sustainable world. One of the effective ways as the individual to contribute to the efforts on the environmental problems is to choose the organic foods instead of cheap mass-produced foods, which tend to ignore the environmental impacts by using chemical fertilizers and so on.

I think investigating the potential market scale of organic foods in Singapore is highly meaningful and exciting because Singapore is in the exact stage that organic markets are about to emerges. In the less developed countries, people don’t afford to select organic foods because making ends meet is as much as they can do. On the other hand, more early developed countries like UK and US have already formed big market of organic foods. As a result, it can be said that Singapore is in the proper moment to research organic food market in scale as well as the other ethical products such as fair-trade food & clothes, eco car and so forth.

Considerable general research question would be like bellow.
“How big is the potential market size of organic foods in Singapore?”

The objective of this study is to offer the basic information of the potential organic foods market to the multinational corporations and local venture companies interested in organic foods.

In order to meet the objective, we need a survey on the Singaporean’s recognition about organic foods. It is because new facts and numbers issued by reliable organization can promote the organic food companies to start business in Singapore.

Thus, the target readers should be the managers of organic food firms. In addition to that citizens of Singapore who are interested in environmental problems may read this study as well.

The Interpersonal Conflict

The meaningful conflict I've experienced recently happened in a group project this July.

I was taking a program called "NUS summer program 2008" organized by NUS entrepreneurship center. The participants were from various countiries(mostly Asia) and they were devided into 8 groups that have 9 people each. Each group were supposed to make a presentaion at last day.My group members were six Chinese, two Japanese and one Pakistani (she was leader). The main problem was that we could't meet all together and have sufficient discussion about the presentation.

We had lectures in the morning and company visit in the afternoon every day, it means we can make enough time only at night. We had short talk about the presentation topic in the lunch time once but it was not until 3 days before that we tried to have a detail discussion, until then the development of ideas were depend on each members.
Although we were suppoed to meet the common room in PGP at 8 pm , only 4 members showed up and the rest didn't come. As a result, we could't make a wholesome discussion nor the work distribution. To make matters worse, we made same mistakes and only 5 members showed up despite the rearangement.

How come we made such a easy but crutial mistakes?
I think there were three reasons for this.

The first one is that not all members had a cell phone and we have relied on the face to face information exchange and not able to check where each members were. Consequently, misunderstanding about the time and location of the meeting were took place based on the failure of conveying the acculate infomation to all the members. The lack of English skills might influence badly for it as well.

The second reason was that each members have thier own cultural back ground. For example, some people (like US) are really punctual but others are not (like Italy, Brazil) ,in general. It was the case for us as well. Also, most of the people are tend to be together with people from same country especially Chinese people. In our group, Pakistani member, who was our leader, spent most of her time with Pakistani people of other group.

The third reason is that not all the members were highly motivatied to the presentation. Some members didin't take the meeting seriously and rather go to the shopping and so on, though it could be the lack of information. If we had had more concsiosness of being the member of the group, we would have done it better.

What if some members were don't show up in your meeting? In my case, I felt that the member was irresonsible and had a bad impression because it really disturbed our progress of discussion. The member might feel, however, why they didn't inform me of that?

What was the possible measures to prevent such misunderstandings?
What was the effective way to ease the tension of each member and get the work done to complete the presentaion?

Why effective communication?

Why developing the effective communication skills is so important? As to me, that is because it is essential to achieve my own goals. There are three reasons for this.
First one is that I won’t be able to materialize to get desired career without good communication skills. For example, I have to success in both job interview and essay of aimed organization. We need those skills to let the examiner know our ability and enthusiasm. Furthermore, it helps me to make good connection with people related to the organization and that can be really advantages in job hunting.
The second reason is that effective communication assists me to get the most of educational chance such as university in which I am just studying. Although I don’t think just making as much friends as possible is make campus life better, it will do good for me provided I have the good interactive techniques such as sharing lecture notes and discussing tutorial topics. Also, the skills are important to get the good relationship with lecturers and that is necessary to get the greatest knowledge out of them.
The third and (probably the biggest) reason is that good communication techniques are indispensable for me to get a girlfriend (and even wife!). It is true that ordinary Japanese men of older generation like my father are not good at communicating with their wives and they tend to think that they have tacit understanding. But, in today’s world where women has getting more power in both the office and home, and international marriages are quite common, we no longer make it possible without effective communication to get the best partner and keep being in good with her.
For these reasons, good communication skills are critically important for me and I’d like to get such techniques in this class as well as improving my English skill.