Reflection on Team Project

The first lesson I have learned from this project is that, even after three years of study here, I am still not that familiar with the local culture. I was indeed surprised when Diana brought up this topic because I had never expected drinking to be a problem at all in Singapore. To be honest, prior to this project, Clarke Quay to me was just the name of another MRT station! I have to criticize myself here. I am that kind of person who never walk outside my room, if not 100% necessary. I have been lazy sitting in front of my screen all the time, and my major in computer science is not an excuse. From this project I learned a deeper side of this country, and I am happy to come up with a concrete proposal to improve the state of drinking together with my teammates.

What is more, I gained an invaluable experience working in a team with each team member from a different culture background. Diana showed an incredible accountability to our project. She spent tremendous amount of effort that both KwangYoung and me appreciated. I was in charge of the background part in the proposal. However, Diana found it unqualified and she basically rephrased everything. The amended paragraphs are far more professional than the original one. KwangYoung was actually able to communicate well in English. When I first came to Singapore, I could barely even understand what people were saying, let alone my lectures full of technical terms. I believe he has no difficulty catching up his architecture classes here. What impressed me the most is his ability to make use of knowledge learned from class. He suggested me to remove long sentences and add "attention getters" in my slides, which makes a presentation more efficient in terms of message conveying.

From this project, I have also learned various techniques that I can incorporate into my future work. For example, when dealing with new issues that are very specific, such as the 3 a.m. rule, there probably will not be too much existing information we can make use of. The only way to analyze them and propose constructive solutions is to conduct primary research from scratch on our own. Another interesting knowledge is that, making keynotes is far trickier than just copying over contents. They are not lecture notes on which everything needs to be in extreme details. We have to carefully choose the words, fonts and colors so that audients can focus on what we say, instead of what is on the screen.

In a nut shell, this team project is one of the most beneficial project during my undergraduate study. I have never realized the importance of effective communication before. I really enjoy the whole process of learning, discussing, analyzing and presenting. I firmly believe that this experience will benefit me in my future career.

Evaluating Intercultural Communication

In this blog I will describe my personal experience on intercultural communication in Singapore during my undergraduate study.

When I first came to Singapore I was excited since that was my first time abroad. Everything was new and wonderful, and I had fun exploring around without feeling a bit tired. I enjoyed my life for the first couple weeks with friends, but soon I felt confused and nostalgias and couldn’t fit myself in.

The toughest barrier in front of me was the language. Unlike in Singapore, English was a foreign language in china. I only learned elementary level in my high school, with most materials in British or American English. I could barely understand what a local Singaporean spoke. Most of the time, they just gave up and communicated with me in Chinese instead. Soon enough, I decided to use Chinese whenever possible.

However, I felt panic when I found myself having difficulty following classes along. The good news was that, for computer science, there were all sorts of open courses online and virtually every university conducted pretty much the same syllabus. I skipped most lectures and instead, I watched lecture recordings from top universities like Stanford and Berkeley. At first, I tried my best to keep up with the pace of the videos. I started to ask questions and read answers online in English. I tried to read programming books in English. Thankfully I could get pretty good results for my exams.

A year ago, there was a group project for the database course I was taking. I got assigned into a group of 3 Singaporeans. I felt a bit worried at the beginning but surprisingly I actually could understand what they talked and I was also able to express my basic ideas in simple English. We got along quite easily and managed to finish the project with good quality.

From my experience I understand that, for overseas students from non-English speaking countries, language barrier is always the toughest cultural barrier that we have to overcome. There are no easy ways to get around with it. You have to try your best and eventually you can feel yourself improving.

Resolving Interpersonal Conflict

It is quite common to have interpersonal conflict, even between best friends, as people have their own minds thus it is impossible for everyone to share the same opinion all the time. 

Fortunately, most conflicts are resolvable. In this blog, I will talk about my own interpersonal conflict experience and what I did to resolve the conflict. 

Last year, I accommodated outside the campus for around a month. During the holiday before moving out, I was too busy to ask any friends to live with me. As a result, I had to search posts from online forums, and pair up randomly. 

I came across a well-written thread and I thought he could be a nice and decent guy, with a clean and regular lifestyle. However, it turned out that he was exactly the opposite kind of person. 

He had been living there for one year and on the first day I moved in I found the room smelly. He was definitely not the type of person that he had described on the forum. The room was messy and gross, with dirty underwear and socks on the floor. And I was shocked about the fact that I never found him showering during that whole month. 

I could not sleep well on the first night. He kept playing computer games until 2:00 am. He was apparently that kind of person who never went out and met people. There was no way he could be empathetic enough to realize what a hard time I was going through. 

What was more, when he finally decided to get to bed, it should be the time I could relax, right? No, that was never the case. He never had trouble falling asleep within 10 minutes. And the reason I could tell this was that he snored every night, punctually, with no exception. I told it to my friends as a joke that there were only two phases for his entire life, playing DOTA (his favorite game) and snoring. 

That was the toughest time ever for me. After one month of suffering, I told him that I decided to move out. And here came the most ridiculous part. He refused to return my $300 one time deposit that was paid when I first moved in. I tried my best not to freak out and analyzed the situation together. My point was that, given I had paid rental fees for two months, and it was still at the beginning of the second month, he could easily find a new roommate without paying more, and it should be the new comer’s obligation to keep the deposit. Fair enough?

There are all kinds of people in the world, thus it is not necessary to be a Mr-I-am-cool-with-anyone. When you encounter a conflict, analyze the situation, and negotiate with him/her. Never give up basic rights and dignity that you deserve. There are things that you should never compromise, however intense the conflict is.