End of Semester 2.2 Reflection

先苦后甜 is a Chinese idiom that I can relate to. It means to go through the bitterness then enjoy the sweetness. I guess I’m in the slightly sweeter part now but still (I’ll talk about this in another post). This semester has been a whole lot of ups and downs. This is a reflection to keep track of how I’ve grown over the past semester.

The module that pushed me the most: Radio Production 2

Vox Pop means ‘voice of the people’. For radio production, our first group assignment consists of interviewing on the street. Doing it again really challenged my limits and pushed me out of my comfort zone. I previously did it during the Exploring Contemporary Issues module in Year One and I said, “I’m never doing this again!!” Nope, nope, don’t say too soon haha. XD I thought it’d be better to take up the role of the interviewer because I had commitments such as the piano concert preparations and may not be able to record in the studio.

We went interviewing at Jurong East where there is more human traffic. Well, I just learnt to have a very very thick skin and just keep getting rejected. Of course, rejection feels bad. Any kind of rejection does. So just feel awkward, walk up to the person and get rejected. Or worse still, get ignored blatantly in the face. I’m thankful that I’m not doing this as a job every day because I wouldn’t be able to take it too well haha.

The second part of being an interviewer is having to conduct the guest interview. As a group, we contacted many many mental health organisations and some didn’t get back to me while others said they weren’t able to do so. Desperate times called for desperate measures, so I went directly to the Mental Health festival at NUS. I approached about 5 or more booths but got rejected due to various reasons.

When I was feeling dejected and about to give up, I told myself to find another way, “Maybe not this event, but who else can I contact? I’m really running out of time. Should I just give up? Haish...” But then, when I was about to approach the last booth, I told myself, “Why not ask? Who knows right? At most I’ll get rejected once more but it won’t hurt. ” So I went to the final booth and Mr Alster Low from Limitless helped me out with the guest interview! Thank you! I was really really elated and grateful. It was very tiring, very worrying and very stressful with our deadline so close by yet not being able to find a guest. Till date, I’m very grateful to those who helped me along the way of this tedious and tiring journey.

After the group project, the assignments were all individually graded. Knowing that Radio Production 2 would be a module I’m weaker in because I lack the ‘radio personality’, I practised a lot technically to feel more confident in my technical skills. I’m thankful for my friends who practised with me and called in or pretended to be my guest. The practice sessions were really fun and sometimes we can be goofy and be funny. I loved the part where we can get to choose the songs we like and topics we’re keen about. This really calmed me down a bit during the exams, through listening to a familiar song I really like.

Lastly, for my final assignment, I had difficulty finding a guest again. This time, it was due to schedule etc. But after contacting three people and thinking about the possible guests to contact again, I thought to myself, what would be a topic I’m passionate about? And yes, that is it. Languages. Foreign languages yes!! So I contacted my teacher who taught me Basic Japanese 102, Esther sensei. Esther sensei, if you are reading this, I just want to say that I am very grateful and happy that you were my guest for my Radio Production final assignment! Haha you were my guest and not nervous at all and on the contrary, you were calming me down and telling me that everything’s gonna turn out fine and just enjoy the interviewing process!

Other people to thank:

For Feature Writing, I would like to thank Kenny and Jeromy for taking the time off to conduct this interview with me at your previous office. I know that you’re very busy but appreciate the fact that you took the effort and time to answer it seriously. And also especially since Jeromy was unwell at that time.

For my second Feature Writing Field Assignment, I would also like to thank Ms Sharon Tan, Mr Paul Liu, and my friends Dennis and Monisha for helping me with my second story on how to overcome negative thinking. It’s a topic I relate to a lot because I tend to see the negative side of things so this article would help me personally as well as for people who think the same way.

To my lecturers: Sometimes I ask pretty obvious questions or anything, but I go by my father’s mantra: “Ask and you’ll receive, seek and you’ll find, knock the door and it’ll open” because he always says asking is better than not. Thank you for your patience in guiding and teaching us, no matter how stupid the question is or anything.

To my group mates: Grateful to have a group of cooperative groupmates and though it was very stressful near the end of the semester, I’m glad we pulled through this!

To my close friends who’ve been my emotional support: sitting together during lectures (or even if we don’t haha) and having lunches and meals together, keeping me updated when I had to miss a lecture, sharing thoughts about school and work etc. And thank you for checking up on me when you felt that I was acting strangely like something was amiss, or when I had family or personal problems and you lent me a listening ear. I am very grateful that we’re there for each other on this journey.

What I’ve learnt over the semester:

• Different people have different working styles, so sometimes, you need to delegate work to get the group going. There may not be an assigned leader or manager of the group but you have to guide the group to get things going. 

• Time flies by when you’re busy and caught up with a lot of things: With so many things at hand, time flies past very quickly when you’re engrossed in completing the assignments and projects at hand.  

• Don’t do last minute work or at least try to avoid it by starting early: Don’t print the assignment just 30 minutes before the deadline! PR gave me a scare because my group finished the project one day early but were left with citations to complete. However, the citations were a lot more than expected. Subsequently, a problem cropped up during printing because the printers at both OS and the library hanged, so it affected all the people who were printing. Hence, we submitted a black and white bound version first and a coloured version of some pages after so that it truly showcases the collaterals we did up for our mock restaurant, Patty’s Diner. 

• An A grade is an additional bonus: A is not everything. I’ve received quite a few Bs for my assignments, even for those I’ve invested lots of time and effort into, like Understanding Relationships module because everybody also put in a lot of effort for it. However, what I’ve gained from such modules is much more. The knowledge and new friends from other courses that I’ve gained through this module will last me a longer time than my GPA I guess hahaha What matters now may be the GPA but how about in 10 years’ time? Will it still be? I was discussing with my friends about this topic and we think the GPA won’t matter as much when we already found a job. And most importantly, as long as you’ve put in your best effort as my mother always says, that’s fine already. At least you’ve no regrets because there’s nothing more you can do. And you can’t possibly be good at everything because that’s quite hard to achieve. What’s more important is your portfolio and experience.

• Priorities- Family or school: Ultimately, it would be family. How I weighed it was because I asked myself “Will I regret it if I don’t do this? What if I do this?” Yes, I would regret it for my whole life if I didn’t say my final goodbye to my very close uncle so I skipped a day’s lecture and fortunately, my lecturer was understanding and allowed me to take a retest for one of my module’s quizzes. As for the rest of the lectures, my attendance is very good so no worries about that. 

• Managing commitments and school work: Outside of school curriculum, I’m in three clubs. Additionally, I signed up for TOPIK(Test of Proficiency in Korean) in last November and am taking a Diploma Plus programme for Basic Japanese 103, so I have to set aside 2 hours every week for that. That does not include time to do homework and revision for quizzes every week and examinations. Nearer the end of the semester, I had to juggle amongst my commitments and very tight deadlines for our projects. This is because for Mass Communication, our semester ends slightly earlier than the rest of the schools due to the absence of examinations. This means our project deadlines are more packed together.

Conclusion:

All in all, I’ll be entering Year Three very soon starting April this year. Hearing experience from my seniors, I’m pretty sure it’ll be more demanding than Year Two, which was quite hectic. I hope I’ll be able to manage it but let’s not worry too early and take one day at a time.

Just ended my semester yesterday with our last deadline down! It really feels SO GOOD to have such a huge burden off my chest and shoulders. The last few days gave me terrible headaches and stomachaches so at least I know what’s the cause of these- stress. Something to look forward to during the break would be my study trip with the School of Interdisciplinary Studies to South Korea in end of March! Now it’s time for me to recover, revise some Korean and take on some caregiving duties, so till the next blog post coming up very soon~