Month: May 2019

Project Week Intermediate Reflection

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(LO 3 Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience)

A community that I consider important is one I built myself. I lead a group to help the New Dawn Educare Center, a care center for mentally disabled people in Taiwan. I decided to start planning five months ahead of the trip to minimize cost. As a result, most of the problems appeared during the planning process rather than during the trip.

The first inharmonious issue came not long after we met a few times. Because two of the teammates were my close friends while the other two just joined us and we barely knew each other, the two new members felt left out. Gradually, they became less and less involved. I noticed this problem and decided to organize several local group trips in Singapore so our members could form better connections with each other. It worked! The atmosphere in our group meetings became much livelier and members started to discuss their real opinions.

I was also anxious about the structure of our team. When teammates participate more in decision making, they feel more engaged. However, it would be extremely inefficient if our team members argued on every possible decision. Furthermore, it seemed fairer if everyone worked the same amount, but we would then waste a lot of effort if we tried to divide everything evenly. I realized the best way to achieve balance was by illustrating to my members that the more work and roles they took, the more weight their opinions would carry in influencing our decisions. This successfully created incentives for members and established a healthier relationship between the leader and the members.

Looking back, I am so proud of the community I created and amazed by how my teammates from Belgium, Bhutan, Ghana, and the Philippines were able to bond tightly together.

Swimming with Hougang Care Center Final Reflection

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(LO 6 Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance)

Time flashes, we are approaching the end of this service. Over the year, our members had quite a good time. From basketball to volleyball, from Zumba to boxing, both the members and students were enjoying the sessions with harmony. Friendships are established among the students, among the members and between the students and the members. No matter the weather condition is good or bad, there are always around 10 of them who come every day. Most of those core members enjoy either playing balls or chill in the water. Some of the students always chat with the members chilling in the water by the side to make sure they are not left out. Misha and I always invite those who would like to play with us.

Though almost a year of interaction, we are already quite familiar with the members. We all have a general understanding of their conditions, hobbies, personalities. In this way, we can offer extra care to them so that they would have a better experience. All of us work in unanimity to achieve our common goal. The students work cohesively and our supervisors were really responsible for helping and guiding us on the way. Giving always feel better than taking. I feel really honored and satisfied by returning the welfare that society has provided me back to itself with the efforts of the whole team. Swimming with Hougang Care Center is one of the most meaningful services I have done and it will have a long-lasting influence on me.

Pictures: The venue of the service — Infant pool; and our equipment.

 

Water Polo Club Final Reflection

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(LO 4 Show commitment to and perseverance in your CAS experiences)

Water Polo Club is probably the most interesting sports I have tried before. It is like a combination of swimming and basketball. This sport may sound easy and simple, but actually it is much more energy consuming than either swimming and basketball. For swimming, you are floating naturally and just need to extract a force pushing you forward. But water polo requires you to fight against most of the gravity all the time only with your legs. Considering the fact that we also need to aim and throw the ball hard, keeping our body stable all the time is important. Your legs are literally like a propeller of a helicopter. My legs are so sour after 5 min of propelling, and it feels much worse than running a 2000 meter, cycling for 50km, or after 2 hours of tennis.

Although this is quite challenging, it is a really fun activity and both the teammates and the coach Ben are really friendly. I had a great time during this activity and hope to do it again next year.

Intermediate Reflection for Swimming with Hougang Care Center

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(LO7-Recognise and consider the ethics implications of choices and actions.)

Working with people who need special care is always associated with different ethical issues. This is because biologically speaking, they are special people, but socially, ethically or politically speaking, they are normal people just as anyone else. This results in a complicated method when working with them—care, understanding, and respect. The first thing that is associated with this is that we need to be really careful about how we call them. When we are referring to them we shouldn’t use ‘clients’, which may hurt their feelings and confidence; instead, ‘members’ is a much better word choice in order to remember them. Beyond that, the way we are chatting with them also has great significance. Even though some of them has disabilities to understand and respond to our chat properly, I still tried my best to pretend that they responded correctly and nodded with a big smile on my face to show my respect and interest to their responses. In this way, I managed to both entertain them and offer respect to them. Last but not least, when we are taking photos of them to keep a report, we always ask them whether they allow photos or not, and we do not take any photos if they would not like us to. This helps maintain their privacy and freedom of decision.

In conclusion, we gain so much experience in dealing with making decisions associated with ethics. From this service, we’ve learned that our minor choices and actions can have a great influence on other people’s feeling, especially those who need extra care from us.

Photo: The photo list that reflects our respect for their privacy.

EE day reflection

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One thing I’ve learned is that the strategy of conducting EE is to start off broad, but end up with doing an experiment which is being simplified to a limited amount of constants, and broaden and deepen the subject with more complicated relationships.

I am proud that I have done enough research to conduct the experiment and establish a model that is optimal for real data collecting.

I am going to finish writing the rationale of my experiment and start doing primary experiments collecting both the real data (attack angle with lift to drag ratio) and the simulator data (all the shapes and lift to drag ratio).