Reflections on the Research Project Experience

I guess that it has been a really tough week for everyone, having to juggle with reports, tests and tutorials on top of our normal heavy workload. It is difficult to prioritize these tasks.

For the ES2007S module, my project group members and I had to come out with the whole report in less than a month. In fact, excluding the time we disseminated the survey, we only had 2 weeks to rush through the introduction, findings and interpretations, conclusion and recommendations. It is really amazing that we could actually complete everything in time despite many other commitments.

I must say that we had a positive learning experience in this project because my group members were very cooperative and helpful. Whenever we encountered any problems during the project, we would help one another out and make it a point to edit one another’s drafts. It is different from individual work in which one has to complete everything on one’s own, though at one’s pace and timing.

In this short period of a month, I have picked up the skills of doing research, learnt how to brainstorm for ideas, create surveys and write letters and reports. An important learning experience I have gleaned is to communicate effectively with others about my own ideas through meetings and discussions. In fact, we managed to inject some humour in the midst of serious work and we learnt interesting things about one another. For example, Xiu Wen and I did not know that Sammy speaks mandarin because he was from Myanmar. Thus, we communicated in English until one day, during our discussion, we found out that his Mandarin is actually much better than ours! Thus, bonding in a group is very significant as it can create a better working environment for group members to produce a good piece of work. Personally, I feel a greater sense of achievement from work done in a group than that completed individually because I get to experience working with different people.

However, I feel that we could have improved on our time management whenever we meet up. Perhaps we could have been better prepared to input ideas to improve on the report instead of having to spend time thinking when we got together. Hence, we should improve on this area for our upcoming oral presentation.