Blog Post #6: Reflecting on the Research Project Experience

1. Being a team player:

The amount of workload that my team members and I are having now can be overwhelming especially when we are currently in the last year of our undergraduate studies. Hence, this project demands us to be able to coordinate our work as a team to meet deadlines and project requirements.

As my team members and I are from a different major but same year of studies, we share almost similar timetables and this makes it easier for us to arrange a common time that is convenient for us to meet and discuss about the project.

However, we still have to manage our hefty workload consisting of various school assignments and tests on top of our individual personal commitments (both in and out of school). I felt that my team members and I did an excellent job on that, because we learnt how to prioritize our activities and make sacrifices when necessary to cater to the needs of our project.

Overall, I have learnt that being a team player is about learning to accommodate to each other's working styles. At the same time, to understand and encourage anyone in the team who is overwhelm by the hefty workload at hand.

2. Doing research:
What I learnt in class is highly effective when comes to research such as conducting verbal interview with our respondents. Before the interview, our group would come together to discuss the answers we hoped to find out from that particular interviewee and we would complied them into a list of questions.

During the interview, I applied some of the 7Cs to speak clearly, correctly and courteously. I also learnt to practice active listening, so that I could give relevant response to what our interviewees brought up immediately, instead of relying on pre-planned questions that were drafted prior to the interview. I felt that this is extremely important to keep the interview process coherent and more natural.

3. Writing proposal:

As this is the first time we were writing proposal, we gained a lot of insight in writing professional proposal from advises given by Brad.

Despite we were struggling with the problem and purpose statement initially, we were able to manage through the project with everyone’s coordinated effort and constant supervision from Brad.

I felt that the use of wiki is highly effective for my team members and I to coordinate our effort. In addition, I was able to look at what other groups have done and to examine the pace of our work whether is it going in appropriate speed. Despite the technical glitches which wiki is facing now, I had an overall enjoyable experience to work with this interface.

Overall, I had a positive learning experience during the project experience.