Reflections on the Research Project

The project has been so far, a very unexpectedly smooth one.

Before I started with this project, I had anticipated a lot of hiccups, falling behind the schedule, shirking of responsibilities. However, none of those happened throughout the whole process of doing the project. Everyone was on time, on target and even went an extra mile each time just to make sure that everything could go according to the plan.

The role of each member in my group was not well-defined at the start of the project, but everyone somehow just settled into their own areas of specialisation as the time went by. Besides writing our own parts for the report, we have contributed to this group project in our own unique ways. Jun Rong, being from Special Project in Science, have much more exposure to writing of reports and conducting of researches, contributed greatly in shaping our reports and making look as professional as we could possibly make it. Tiffany, who is very good with details and administrative matters and has an excellent command of English, coordinated all the meetings and distributions of work. She also collated, edited and finalised our work before compiling them. As for me, being a shrewd person and perfectionist at the same time, I provided insightful opinions with regards to the analysing of our results and counter arguments to our own analysis in order to make sure that our work is unbiased, all-rounded and realistic.

After this project, I am thoroughly convinced that meetings can be short and effective at the same time. Our group exploited IT by communicating mainly through emails. We normally had short meetings of around half an hour after ES seminar to discuss the general direction of our project and dedication of tasks to the individuals. Under time constraint, communication was forced to be short and crystal clear, leaving no room for misunderstanding and miscommunication. Everyone was punctual for their own parts of the work distributed and that made the compiling much easier for Tiffany. I strongly suspect that the uncanny efficiency of everyone was largely due to the fact that we are already into our 3rd year in NUS. With the experiences and skills we have gained over the past 3 years, I believe everyone now not only understand the pain of having to rush projects at the last moment, but also have mastered the ability to conduct secondary research required for our project efficiently with the help of Internet. However, we understand that over-reliance on online sources can be a dangerous thing as some of them might not be accurate or reliable. We do need to fall back on the good old books in the libraries.

The skill of communicating clearly and efficiently could be and should be extended to our oral presentation. Again, this is to cut down unnecessary time spent on doing redundant things which overlap with one another. However, as the next project is in the form of oral expression, I believe we cannot rely on communicating with each other through emails again like we did. The time for meeting one another face-to-face and speaking with one another using verbal and non-verbal forms of languages has come.