Saturday, October 11, 2008

Blog Post #5 - Reflecting on the Research Project Experience

I have to thank everyone in ES2007S from my group and especially cooperation from my teammates and guidance from Mr. Brad. I am strongly agree that this is really a positive experience for me to learn and to improve myself in terms of communication skill, report writing skill, teamwork, and time management.

In our first meeting, we discussed and filtered the ideas to generate a final idea for our research topic. From that, we came to the final decision to choose the topic of "Green Campus" as our research topic. However, "Green Campus" was too general and hence we made our topic became more precise by focusing our scopes within water and energy related topics. We were not only discussed on our research topic during the meetings, but we also shared the joy of eating snacks. :P

From the report writing, I have learnt citation and quotation of external sources as we had been taught of the serious consequences of plagiarism from Mr. Brad and hence I have properly cited and quoted from the sources and generated a proper APA style references in our research report.

In my opinion, the most tedious job in this report writing was the literature review which i think it was quite time-consuming. Our sources are mainly come from the online journals, online articles, online information, as well as books from our NUS Central Library. It spent me more than 1 week to screen through all these sources to search for related information. It brought me a pair of sore eyes and numb fingers due to long hours "googling".

However, I felt the sense of fulfillment once i could extract all the related information and pass it to my groupmates for further process for our report. Trust, respect, and understanding are the most important elements in our group, we trust each other once we passed the report for further process after one's job was done. We respected and understood one's situation through the whole process which finally led us to the success of our printed finalized report. The coordination between us was so appreciable and this is also one of the key elements in a group work.

During the whole process, our report were always under stringent supervision from Mr. Brad in every ES2007S tutorials. He reviewed each of our draft reports and ensured our mistakes and errors made in the report were minimized by providing his professional and technical advice. From that, we were able to learn from mistakes and we made improvements for our report writing.

Finally it is HERE our printed report to be ready for submission on Monday. Last but not least, i would like to say thank you again to my teammates and Mr. Brad.

7 comments:

Brad Blackstone said...

Thank you, Jacky, for the highly detailed post (and for all the hard work!). I like the way you address the various stages on the research process. I'm also happy that your work group managed to be so positive.

Now I look forward to reading your group effort!

qwergo said...

Hi Jacky, I like the way you make this sound like a thank-you speech haha. But seriously, you made me feel through reading your post that teamwork can be rewarding and gratifying if everyone was conscientiously working hard towards the same goal. Great job!

Chun Siang said...

@ BRad - yes, we managed to work out the report happily and positively, there is no doubt that we worked under pressure of deadline but this spurred us to move faster and efficient.

@ qwergo - Thanks, I do believe that teamwork and mutual understanding are very important in a group project, I really appreciate that our group can achieve this.

Joycee said...

Hey Jacky! I think you have been a great team member to all of us! I can see that you're very conscientious and efficient in what you do. I really appreciate that. =)

I'm glad that all four of us are able to work together and this is one of the most efficient groups I have encountered.

Let's work even harder together for our oral presentation and make our audience gape in awe after that. Haha!

Wong Liang Fu said...

Hey Jacky!

Thanks for all the hard work with the research! You took the initiative to borrow books and look up the journals even before we got down to that!

Of course, thanks so much for correcting the references section a thousand times!

Enjoyed working with you! All the best with your FYP!

alibooboo said...

Hello.
You know, you are so right about the whole googling thing! The projects that we have all taken up are things that are not related to our major and alot of research had to be done to prepare for this report! I would have to agree with you about the 3 things that help to move the group forward, and I am glad that you guys worked so well as a team!
Looking forward to you presentation!=]

timothy said...

hey I guess the research report bonded everyone in the group. Yes there were tough times. However at the end of the day there is that sense of satisfaction when you finally submit the report. Its that weird feeling that makes it all worth while. Well that is my personal opinion. I hope that it is the same for you too. Good luck for the upcoming presentations. :)