Critical Reflection

Module Learning - 

It was a meaningful and memorable period to have this module in the first trimester of my university life to jump straight into discussions on the first day of school. It was the perfect opportunity at this stage of our lives, fresh out of national service and into university, to participate in this module to search for critical thinking and communication skills we have lost back while serving the nation. 

Before taking on this module, I felt that the module was not needed as I thought I already had the communication and critical thinking skills in my inventory. However, I told myself to just listen and try to pick up things which I might not have learnt before. True enough, upon deeper listening, I realized that whatever skills I thought I had was nowhere near the level I thought I was. If someone asked me what this module taught me in a short answer, I would say that it taught me about communication and critical thinking is a continuous learning process. It will never be enough, only better. What I found most useful from this module other than what I learnt was the materials and online resources. I would look back and refer to these resources in future when I work on my final year project, preparing for interviews and even working in teams.

Project learning - 

Through working on the reader response, I learnt the process of writing summaries after reading on research and reports based on the topic. I feel that this is essential especially for us future engineers as we often encounter the problem of explaining technical aspects to people outside of our industry, who might find it difficult to understand. As such, I am very glad I went through this learning process as it puts me on an advantage compared to people who are not able to put technical ideas into concise and plain terms for the average joe to understand.

From the reader response, we moved onto working on a product idea that pushes our innovative brains. This to me was the main highlight of the module. I thoroughly enjoyed working with my team as I genuinely felt the chemistry among us where we were able to hear each other’s opinion and advice and reaching decisions collectively. We did not just communicate for the sake of work, but also getting to know each other more as a person. Initially, we thought very hard for an idea that is unique to us and out of the norm. The process of innovating ideas is very interesting, as the best ideas often comes in randomly. I was proud of me and my team to be able to complete the presentation within our expectations considering that we had tests and other project submissions going on at the same time. I genuinely felt that we did well for the first presentation we did since we were in polytechnic, which was more than two years ago. I took on the role of speaker for the group, my role was to present to the class on the team’s progress and direction. I volunteered for this role as I thought I was good at articulating my thoughts and this role was very suitable for me.