My Last Words … for this semester!

Looking back at my short first post, I have no idea why I became a rambling writer of long posts as the semester wore on. Perhaps the tedium of my other modules pushed me to spend more and more time expressing my thoughts. I believe the reason is more likely to be because Brad is such a great teacher and I did not want to submit sub-standard work for him and my long suffering blogging buddies to read. (It was still not great in the end and people had to endure reading my never-ending posts and worse, comments.) Admittedly, I was also lazy, the extra posts that I thought I would write (and asked Brad about) never materialized.

The irony is that I decided to take this module as I wanted to learn resume and cover letter writing skills. Also, I needed to practice how to perform well in an interview. I lived a cloistered life in academia and have never experienced much of the big, bad world of job searching before. A tiny mosquito put paid to any chance I could learn the skills I originally aimed to learn. There is this sense of frustration and annoyance. However, I learnt many other lessons about communication in this module and I even learnt more about myself. Apparently, my mastery of the English language leaves much to be desired.

I also made friends in this module and realized many others share my “pain” as undergraduates. They also advised and guided me along this busy journey. There were communication lessons to be learnt as we tried to criticize each others’ work without being mean or hurtful.

I cannot say I am an effective communicator now. E.g. I need to stop freaking out during presentations. My writing skills are still not up to par. I am not professional enough in both written and verbal communication. However, I have tried my best in the assignments and that is the best I can do at this point of time.

To quote my first post, “learning to express ourselves well is a lifelong process”. I wish everyone well in their future pursuits. See you guys around in … school (wallows in misery and despair as the specter of examinations looms).

Aftermath of the Presentation

If I only had 2 words to describe my feelings about the presentation, it would be, "I survived!" If you know me personally, the person I become when I present is totally different. It is possession, I always believe. Luckily, this time I was possessed by an "okay" spirit.

I am very passionate about this subject (refer to my biodata if you like) and I felt I did not do justice to the secondary sources I read. I am the fool who watched Steve Jobs' keynote address but still did not perform very well. In my anxiety to cut words and add pictures, I forgot to organise my slides and what I speak. Looking at the confused faces, I should probably have included more text and punchlines. I think I spoke too fast too and rambled at certain junctures.

I am grateful for Yuvraj's optimism and relative calm compared to me. I am a worrier and the short time we had to prepare just made me panic more. Furthermore, Yuvraj's laptop crashed last Friday and my laptop keep having wireless problems. However, I think both of us were acceptable given the circumstances.

Thank you to the audience for the questions. Dinesh, I liked the glamour question and I felt it was such a great question your group should address it too. I do not wish for a great impact but I hope after seeing this presentation, you would try your best to reduce and reuse. We still have too many years left to live on this planet to destroy it in our time.

Biodata

My name is Ang Shi Hui Annie and I am currently a third year undergraduate majoring in Life Sciences (Molecular and Cellular Biology) in the National University of Singapore. I will be going to the University of Toronto in the next academic semester to obtain a joint minor in Environmental Biology. Even though this opportunity came late in my university studies and I would be taking a costly step to graduate in 5 years (with all the accompanying costs of studying overseas) instead of 4, I believe that this money is well-spent as it is in a subject I am enthusiastic about.

Biology has always been my passion since my secondary school days. My interest in research is now towards evolution, ecology and biodiversity, in particular, microbial diversity. Also, I am keen on merging my research interest with my enthusiasm for green policies. An example would be researching on tailoring microorganisms for oil spill remediation or studying the impact of human intervention on a particular natural habitat. I have learnt several experimental techniques during my 3 years of laboratory sessions. I hope to brush up on laboratory skills in my honours year, especially microbiological techniques as that is my chosen honours topic.

In my free time, I volunteer with Students Care Service. I joined to help an old friend but stayed because I realized I loved children. I work with children in the centre who have issues such as hyperactivity disorders and family problems. Although they stress me out with their hyper energy and often nonsensical behavior, I continued joining the sessions as their gaiety never fail to cheer me up. Their erratic happy behaviour also reminds me of the simple joys in life and that my world did not only revolve around laboratories and lecture theatres. In addition, my other volunteer experience includes 2 overseas volunteer trips to Chiang Rai, Thailand and Yunnan, China in my secondary and junior college days respectively. All these experiences gave me a wider and more humanistic perspective to life. I see myself participating in social work in any small way no matter what my future career choice would be.

How to best express WHAT you want to say…

Taken from www.dilbert.com

My apologises for using a dilbert comic but I believe if you want to find comics to do with communication (or the lack thereof), dilbert.com should be your first stop. This post is inspired by one of my professors in the Life Sciences, who insisted and repeated lecture after lecture that we have to find our best learning style and our innate flaws when it comes to learning something. After taking the survey mandated by him, I found I would benefit from a mix of all styles (aural, visual, touch) so the survey was rather pointless for me. (I would include a URL, unfortunately, some links on the page no longer works.)

I am sure several people have described communication style much better than I could have ever done. The focus of my post, illustrated by the comic, is about recognising communication flaws and learning how to best accommodate it. No, I am not telling you to pretend that you can present like the guy in the comic if you lack a whiteboard (and need one)! I believe everyone has their innate flaws that years of education and common sense might not be able to erase (that is what makes people interesting). For me, I seem to always end up messing my presentation notes. Being a spontaneous person, I tend to jump into the situation and when my memory fails me, I will frantically refer to the notes and then fail to find the information I need. After several similar experiences, I realise the best solution for me is to prepare 150% and thus if I can only recall 80% during the actual presentation, I would still pass. This method is not for everyone for obvious reasons.

Recently, during my Singapore politics lecture, the lecturer played a video of speakers talking about Singapore’s future. There were 6 speakers from extremely varied backgrounds and each of them spoke from different perspectives. I will highlight three to illustrate communication flaws in each and how they overcame it. The first speaker was a member of parliament. He had copious notes, typical of a day of parliament where detail is important to argue your case. He spoke well, his message was clear but he had a few pauses here and there despite his notes. To make up for his hesitation when speaking, he clearly demarcated his speech into 3 points and emphasized them again and again. There were clear checkpoints in his speech and no one was ever confused which point he was talking about. The moral of the story is preparation is key (clichéd but true).

The second speaker I remembered was a Singaporean playwright. Unlike the speakers ahead of him, he chose to give his speech sitting down. He told the audience frankly that he was a fidgety person and if he stood to speak, his physical behaviour will distract people from his message. Throughout the speech, even though it appeared that he read word for word from his papers, it was still an entertaining performance. Perhaps, as a playwright, he is best at putting words to paper but letting other people perform his ideas. What I admire about his communication style is his courage to admit his flaws so frankly. He really fidgeted a lot, even while sitting down. Not everyone can do that and find ways to make up for their deficiencies.

The third speaker was astounding. She was Dr Catherine Lim, a famous Singaporean author and social activist. With no notes whatsoever, she gave her speech without any pause except for breath and seemed to have thought of her speech spontaneously as she spoke. She ended with a bang, with a short humorous poem. Her speech was very informative but the humour would have been ill-suited for a very formal situation, e.g. parliament debates. However as it was a talk for university students, it was just right to wake everyone up.

I am still learning to accept all my flaws and make up for them. I would be curious to know what your communication flaw is and how you accepted/corrected it.

http://www.cdtl.nus.edu.sg/success/sl8.htm Most of the links no longer works but it is still a cool website to visit.

Don’t kill the sacred cow!

During my junior college days, I went for a Youth Expedition Trip (YEP) to Yunnan, China. The objective of this YEP was to help secondary school students from a rural area with their mastery of English language. To achieve this, we also assisted in setting up a library with English books.

In preparation for the trip, I attended some training sessions with seasoned YEP leaders. One of the most memorable lessons I learnt was the story of “Killing the sacred cow”. Some well meaning Singaporeans had embarked on a YEP to one of India’s villages. Hindus, as we all should know, revere cows. Unfortunately, the participants of this YEP will bring the actual reason to their graves, they were all chased out of the village violently within days of arrival. The villagers had accused them of insulting the cows. The leader who told us bright-eyed youths this story warned us to be always sensitive to the customs of other cultures and to focus on our objective. Our main purpose is to both teach the children and also to learn from them, and not to judge their culture or put them down.

To be honest, I am critical of some policies of the communist government of China. After arriving at the rural areas of China and witnessing the propaganda first-hand, I was even more convinced that I was right about my misgivings. During my entire trip, I suppressed the urge to shout, “As if!” to the cadres I came across (which would have made things worse). My tolerance, in retrospect, rewarded me greatly.

If I had stayed in the narrow, biased and bitter frame of mind, I would not have been inspired by the happiness and positive work attitude of the children. Despite having limited resources, the efforts of their teachers to help every single child were also worthy of praise. In every culture and country, children are indeed the hope for the future. Also, I admire China’s rich culture and history. I would love to explore other provinces in the future.

In inter-cultural communication, tolerance and open-mindedness are of great importance. Politeness and etiquette are universal values that should be upheld, whether you are in the modern city of New York or in the slums of India. It just takes a little more empathy and a little less arrogance (since we were born privileged) to see the good in people. Unless we are confident that we can put our opinions across tactfully, we should avoid the touchy topics such as politics and religion.

Image © http://www.abc.net.au/ If I have infringed any copyrights law, please leave a comment, I would remove the image asap.

Never forward Emails without thinking.

Below is an actual email I received from a Professor whom I am working part-time for. I have deleted all names because the Professor is a nice person but this email was just baffling. There are 2 part-timers; the other one is “name deleted for confidentiality”. I have been informed I had to do something about uploading images. However, all I received to alert me was this entire chunk of messages without a greeting, explanation or preamble. Each email is divided by a line, in reverse chronological order. The actual email contents are not really important. They are just there to show the lengthy email exchange between the other part-timer and my Professor that was sent to me in its entirety without editing.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: RE:

Dear name deleted for confidentiality

I am copying this message to Annie. Getting the morphbank uploads organized requires division of labor. So, we'll have to discuss this in a short meeting.

With best wishes,
Prof
---------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: RE:

Dear Prof,

Can I have her email account? I can try contact her.

Best Regards,
name deleted for confidentiality
---------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: RE:

Dear name deleted for confidentiality:

no problem. given that the upload is pretty slow, you may want to share the job with Annie. But I leave it up to you to decide.

With best wishes,
Prof
---------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: ??

Dear Professor,

I am sorry for this. I myself did not expect to stay at home for that long so I did not bring back any material necessasy for uploading. I will try to catch up with this.

Best Regards,
name deleted for confidentiality
---------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: RE:

Dear name deleted for confidentiality:

I was just curious what had happened. It'll be good if we can continue with the upload. Annie is more or less done with extracting the text for the species pages.

With best wishes,
Prof
--------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: RE:

Dear Professor,

I am so sorry that I have not notify you in advance. I went back home in the last couple of days and did not bring back the CD with me. But now I am back to Singapore and will resume working really soon. I am really sorry about making you confused.

Best Regards,
name deleted for confidentiality
---------------------------------------------------------------
Subject:

Dear name deleted for confidentiality:

It looks like you stopped uploading images. Are you still interested in continuing?

With best wishes
Prof
---------------------------------------------------------------

I replied to this email that I was confused as to what was expected of me. This incident ended amicably as I got an idea what I was supposed to do in the end. The whole email could have been summarised. The following is what I would have written.

Subject: Images Uploading

Dear Annie,

With reference to what I have discussed with you previously, “Name deleted” is having difficulty uploading all the images alone. I would like you to help out as well. This would require a meeting to be scheduled for the three of us to discuss the division of labour.

You will be taught by “name deleted” how to go about doing your task. You will also be given a CD with the necessary images.

Please revert back to me as soon as possible when you are available for the meeting.

Regards,
Prof

One lesson I learnt about this episode is never be too caught up with the widespread use of forwarding and "cc-ing". Even if you have discussed the matter with the other party previously, it is still better to write a summary and a proper email. It will also show you have thought things through. At the very least, it is just common politeness.

Catfight!

This story is based on a real encounter that happened in a private company in Singapore, noted for being probably the last private local enterprise with a pension program for all employees.

Let’s call the dramatis personae Andrea, Beatrice and the Boss. Andrea, who is single, feels that the workload allocated to Beatrice (who is married with children) was too little since both of them are of the same position. When she confronted Beatrice about this matter, Beatrice was extremely agitated and even swore at Andrea. Andrea decided to let the matter rest but the situation only worsened, with Andrea’s workload multiplying while Beatrice continued to take only less than half the workload.

Finally after a long struggle, Andrea decided to confide in the Boss. She told the Boss that she feels the division of workload was not fair and justified. The Boss thus called Beatrice to the office privately to discuss the matter with her. The Boss told Beatrice Andrea’s stand on the workload and his hopes that they would come to a compromise. To Andrea’s horror, Beatrice started crying and accused Andrea of bad-mouthing her. Beatrice also told the Boss that she is having a difficult time taking care of her children. The Boss empathized with Beatrice and put Andrea’s misgivings aside. He told Andrea to put in more effort to complete the tasks since she is single. After this incident, Beatrice has been treating Andrea as public enemy number one, never missing a chance to snipe at her.

All 3 persons are unlikely to quit as the amount of pension received is determined by the duration of one’s employment with the company. Other than her issue with Beatrice, Andrea has had a pleasant time working at her department as she is given many learning opportunities. In addition, she has been promoted consistently. However, she cannot stop feeling discriminated against because of her marital status or lack there of. Due to the unequal workload, she could not have personal time for a proper social life or be with her elderly parents.

Beatrice, on the other hand, believes that Andrea is out to get her. She feels that Andrea should have more sympathy for her since she is having a tough time juggling between work and family. Even though her workload is lesser than Andrea, she believes she is still doing a good job. As there are such good prospects in the company, she will not consider leaving. She also does not think her snappish behaviour is wrong due to her stress. To her, an occasional slip-up is forgivable.

The Boss, seeing that productivity in the office has not dropped, decided to turn a blind eye to the interpersonal conflict brewing in his department. Since everyone is doing a good job, why disturb the status quo?

I find this relevant because when we enter the working world, we would most likely still been unmarried. How much slack will we take up for our married colleagues? How do you think this stalemate can be resolved?

P.S. I hope no animals will harmed in the making of the above picture.

The significance of Communication

Humans were born communicators, bawling our hearts out for attention from the start. As we grow up (and grow old), people around us become less tolerant of the mistakes we make when conducting ourselves, e.g. jumping up and down while talking is cute for a 5-year-old child but unbecoming for an adult of 25. Thus, learning to express ourselves well is a lifelong process. At each phase of life, one gets to interact with different people hence it is necessary to adapt to different customs and attitudes. As Asians (or perhaps only in my traditional family), we tend to be quite reticent and leave things unsaid. It is thus even more important to perceive the hidden cues to avoid misunderstandings. It is also rare that fellow Asians will openly criticise your failings when communicating so it is critical to be self-aware. I hereby thank my close friends who corrected my mispronunciations and wrong use of tenses without a second thought.

I love chit-chatting, but the gregarious side of me only shows up when I am surrounded by close friends and family. I also speak without thinking often and to quote my English teacher in junior college, “I have a 5 second memory, like a goldfish”. To improve my skills, I would have to work doubly hard, especially when listening and recalling what others have told me.

To my blogging group and classmates (if you are so conscientious that you read my attempt as well), let’s have an enjoyable journey learning how to be effective communicators together.