Critical Reflection

At the start of UCS1001, I had set a goal for myself, which was to improve my communication skills and become a better writer and speaker. Throughout my journey, I did see improvement in my overall communication skills after learning about the Paul Elder framework, I was able to articulate my thoughts and put them into words allowing me to become more confident and outspoken. Looking back, I have always had a reserved personality, which makes it difficult for me to speak in a crowd and keeping silent was more comfortable than giving my opinions. This module gave me the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and I’ve learnt to voice out my thoughts more and keep my train of thoughts while presenting to a group. I am also more confident in my writing abilities, a method that I found useful is to jot down my thoughts in point form first, before elaborating on the ideas, this way I am able to see if I can find linking pointers and structure my report better. Additionally, I’ve also learnt about non-verbal cues while presenting, having hand gestures and eye-contact while presenting will help to engage the audience and allow them to follow through with your presentation. Two things that really helped me to build my confidence was to record my own presentations to rewatch them to see how I can improve and do mock presentations with my family and close friends, while they give their feedback on how I can do better. Regardless of written or spoken communications, it will definitely be used in the working world while we work in teams and have to present to managers our findings. This module has given me valuable experience in honing my communication skills and I feel more confident heading out into the working world now. 

During this module, we were tasked to research and implement a new modification to a mechanical design and write up a technical report. There was a lot of research work involved in this project as we had to find articles to back up our pointers to ensure they are reliable and make our report easy to digest for our audience. Whilst doing this, I also learnt about the basics of APA citation and different ways to summarize effectively. There were many reference materials on APA for my team to refer to, I realized the importance of citation as it makes my report verifiable and written based on facts. My audience is able to see where I got the information from and find out more if they are interested in a particular topic. During my research, I was also wary to avoid articles that are not from a trustworthy source and those that are spreading misinformation to ensure that my facts are correct. 

In the beginning, my group was still warming up to each other and we did not know what each other's working style was. After a few meeting discussions, I found out that Zong Xiang was very efficient in finding good research articles that are reliable and addresses the points we are covering. I also found out that Hui Xiang has a very creative mind and gives useful suggestions on possible ways to improve the products. One challenge our team faced was finding out that our topic has too many cons that outweighs the pros. With this, our team decided to change our topic one week before the presentation even though we spent two weeks on it which puts us back to square one. After which we spent many brainstorming sessions to find another topic that was more realistic to work on. Despite the short time frame, with teamwork and communication, we were able to map out a clear direction on how to proceed with the project and this managed to put us back on track.

I am glad that this module has provided the skills and experience that can help me in the future and by having an approachable professor as well as capable teammates made it a better experience. I plan to continue cultivating these skills that I have picked up, ensuring that I bring forth my learnings from this module into writing better reports and presentations for both my academic and work life.