Final Reflection

I have never been a big fan of project work, because I always feel it's a kind of long-term torture. >< However, I have never felt that way during the entire course of this ES2007S project. :) I guess it was made bearable and even pleasurable by my awesome group mates - Jacinth, Caleb and Johnny. I believe I would never have done the project this well alone and I would never dare to take up this huge responsibility alone.

Our team usually decides on ideas and things very quickly after everyone voices out their opinion. On our first meeting, we decided to narrow down to the topic on sustainable growth. Immediately, we decided to do more research by a deadline and I went on to do up the Gantt chart on NUS wiki and everyone referred to it and met the deadlines. We also made use of NUSwiki to put up the minutes after each meeting so each person knows what he/she has to do. It was pretty effective at the start when we’re just deciding the roles and responsibilities of each person and the deadlines that we set. However, when we started to write the proposal, we tried using the macro function of NUSwiki of embedding the Microsoft word (MSword) document on the wiki page. Unfortunately, it was not very effective because it was very troublesome. Somehow I couldn’t open the macro directly from the wiki page using my home computer, so I had to download the attachment, edit it, and then upload it onto wiki again. We tried using google docs at first too, but we realise it will screw up the formatting (from past experience) so we decided to use MSword directly. Finally when NUSwiki was shut down for a week for maintenance, I decided to make use of dropbox to share our documents and even our research. Ever since I started using dropbox, I have fallen in love with it. <3 The only problem with it is that it cannot tell you when two or more people are viewing that same file, resulting in your saved file being overwritten or conflicted. Thankfully, Jacinth suggested a brilliant idea of copying the file onto our own desktop and then edit it and save under a new name and upload it back into dropbox. We also complement each other very well in the sense that we all work at different time of the day, so we usually will not be in conflict.

Other than the “hardware”, I think generally our “software” was great too. Meetings were never a bore with Johnny Lim (bei) and Caleb (batman) there. Although we joke, we still get our work done, so it is the best of both worlds. We have mutual respect and will always listen (not hear) carefully to everyone’s ideas and opinions before deciding on something. Overall, I think our team dynamics has been great since the start. One reason might be because I have been friends with Caleb and Johnny for the past 3 years; so it was comfortable working with them. It was very easy for me to communicate with them as well. I could just text them through SMS or MSN or even discuss face-to-face because we see each other every lecture. I also worked with Jacinth for the peer teaching prior to this proposal project, so we were more or less familiar with each other. We started off using emails as a tool for communication but slowly shifted to SMS because it is much faster (because I’m the only one without a smart phone).

Now that the semester has come to an end, I kind of miss having ES2007S lessons because every lesson has been very interesting, interactive and never boring. This module has equipped me with essential communication skills that will definitely be useful in future and I hope it will give me an edge over the other engineers who did not take this module. :P