UCS1101 – Critical Reflection

 Module Reflection

At the start of the module, one of my main goals was to be able to speak confidently and not shutter as it has been bothering me for so long. I was able to work on how I can speak confidently in class when Professor Brad will encourage us to read out paragraphs during class. I was at first quite shy and not able to speak confidently but over the module, I felt more confident even if I read the paragraphs wrong.  When my classmates were being called to read paragraphs, I would often read to myself so that I can practice reading out and gain more self-confidence if I was called to read next. I found out that the only way to improve this is to practice reading out loud consistently. I used Singlish during the presentation due to my habit of using Singlish a lot when talking to my friends and family. This results in my presentation not being credible and sounding unprofessional. During this module, Professor Brad emphasized not using Singlish during his lessons and presentation. In the beginning, I still used quite a bit of Singlish. However, after a few weeks, my usage of Singlish in this class reduced significantly. In the final presentation, I managed to use proper English and no Singlish at all.

One of the ways to improve ourselves is to be given feedback when we are doing an assignment, we would give peer evaluation and give each other constructive feedback on how we can improve better. The peer feedback was given to us by random classmates assigned by Professor Brad. This way, we can ensure that the feedbacks are not biased. When writing feedback for our classmates, we can also take the opportunity to reflect on our own assignments and check if we committed the same mistakes, we pointed out to them.

Project Reflection

In the terms of teamwork skills, I realize this was the first module that allowed us to work with each other when we first started school. Professor Brad would have us work in groups of 2 and 3 so that we can learn together and discuss the work that we have been given. This led to us being more comfortable working in teams and understanding how we can work on each other schedules. Also, to dedicate the workload evenly amongst each group member so that we can have time to work on the other modules. This is to be fair to everyone in the group.  We learned ways how we can improve our presentation skills by maintaining eye contact with the audience, not using filler words or Singlish, and giving a proper formal professional presentation by keeping the content short and simple for the audience to listen better. This was the first module in which we had to give a formal presentation. It was a nerve-wrecking experience as we did not know what to expect however we did our best and Professor Brad gave us personal feedback on how we can improve our future presentations. Keeping the audience’s attention would be one of the next skills I would like to work on next.

When we started to do our technical report as a group, we remember to use the skills that we have learned during the class and our previous individual assignments such as citing the sources that we found on the internet and applying the critical thinking framework while we are researching for content.  As we are learning this for the first time in university, however, this is a very important skill as we will be more reports in the future and our future workplace.