Thursday, October 23, 2008

Tan Rui Sheng's Biodata

I am currently en route to graduating from the National University of Singapore with a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree. In the 4 years of my tertiary education, I was given the opportunity to go on an exchange program to Boston University, USA. Having studied in a foreign university, I have been exposed to the different educational structure and teaching styles, as well as interacted with people of different cultures and languages.

Apart from the academic education that NUS has provided me with, I was highly involved in extra activities such as being part of NUS Eusoff Hall's Dance production. I was the dance director of the Dance production where I was in charge of 60 dancers. Being an avid sportsman, I played badminton, sepak takraw, volleyball, softball, handball and swam for Eusoff Hall and took part in the inter-hall competitions. I also played competitive badminton and was the captain of the NUS badminton team, which has taught me both management and organizational skills.

The work experience I have to date include doing an internship at ST Aerospace, where I dealt with the structural defects and maintenance of the Boeing 737-300 series and Airbus A320/321 aircrafts. I also worked as a relief teacher and an educational assistant with Kumon International.

I have a strong interest in sports and my other activities include diving, cycling and playing the piano.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Looking back...

Apart from learning that NUS students have a positive attitude on the idea of having a Powernap House, I have had a great time working together with Stephany and Joanna on this project.

Briefly, the way we operated is described as follows. As instructed, we had to submit draft reports of our project at the various stages. For example, when we had to submit our first draft with our introduction up to the methodology, our group split the work up into three parts: the introduction and objectives, the scope and limitations and finally the methodology. When this was done, each of us would take one part, work on it and we would then look at each other's parts, edit and give our comments.

By working this way, we were able to split the work equally among the 3 of us. Not only were we able to achieve the main objective, we were committing a reasonable amount of time for this project and not neglecting our other modules. Also by working on individual parts, we avoided getting in each other's way and helped prevented conflicts. There were times when the work could not be split equally, but this was not much of a problem for us as we took initiatives to volunteer to take on the heavier loads, covering for each other when one of us had other more urgent things to attend to. I would hence like to commend on this as I find it pretty amazing that we could work this well together in a team for us who just got to know each other for not more than 3 months.

On my part however, I feel that I wasn't able to convey certain ideas across well enough, there would always be times when I would not be able to find the right word to use to describe what I was really thinking. From this, I feel that I really need to improve on my command of English and to organise my thoughts before trying to sell my ideas. This is important not only for the upcoming oral presentation but also in the future when I enter the workforce.

On the whole, I must say that working with Stephany and Joanna has been a great experience, we have complemented each other well, with Stephany being resourceful in finding most of the literature reviews and journals, and Joanna with her excellent knowledge of using Microsoft Word and Excel.