Reflection

When I first saw "Mastering Communication" appearing in the school's registration instructions, the first thing that come to my mind was: will I learn something from the course? Having heard of "Effective Communication" from my engineering friends for months, I wanted to find out whether it will be as interesting, or otherwise, as what my friends had described to me. Surely, the most appealing part of the course is that it has no final exam and it is pass/fail graded.

For lectures, I had always enjoyed attending HW111A lectures, even when I sometimes doubt that I remember anything, or learn anything when I step out of LKC-LT.

For tutorials, I was grouped together with three other persons; two of them are my friends, as we had agreed to register the same index number for the course. The other person was a complete stranger; though we are coursemates, I had never noticed her before. Three of us are Chinese-educated Malaysians, while she is a Singaporean with a Singaporean education background. Besides that, she can think faster than any of us during a discussing section, leaving us with nothing to talk about. While discussing about our presentation, sometimes I felt that she is too arrogant and demanding. But from another point of view, she has to deal with three complete strangers, each of them with different views, perceptions and command of English. She has also the same workload as we have, not lesser. She also has the same goal: to pass the course.

I think that's why we need to learn to master communication: to communicate with different individuals. We cannot possibly stick to the same group of people for the whole of our lives and not communicate with other groups of people. Learning to communicate is not just a one-semester course; it's a lifetime course.