Lim Sze Ting (MIC190018)

GIG 1005 SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Reflective Writing

Workshops in SMK Lembah Subang

Lim Sze Ting (MIC190018)                                                                 Date: 19 March 2020

Christopher McCandless once said: “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” Life is way more interesting if we try to be engaged with different kinds of person in our daily life. I am an introvert person and I always like to stay in my comfort zone as possible as I could. Before joining this social engagement, I used to be a timid girl who did not want to escape from my comfort zone. I had no idea how it would be like to encounter and communicate with people who are beyond my reach. 

Dr. Puah, who is our advisor and instructor, gave us a talk on the structure of Social Engagement course before our first semester ended. Not only us who are from first year of Biomedical Science, second year seniors were to take this course as well. I had attended an internal workshop and it really helped me a lot to know more about the hands-on we were going to assign to the students in SMK Lembah Subang. My teammates and I tried our best to involve ourselves throughout the process as to put ourselves in their shoes. Few of us worked in a small team and guess what, it was our first-time experience to gargle a mouthful of salt water for three minutes which was long for us. Everyone held in laughter to avoid water from spouting out from our mouth. We had another session of hands-on about DNA finger-printing as well. I was nervous but also looking forward to the actual day in the school. 

On the first day in SMK Lembah Subang, each of us was very enthusiastic and eager to conduct the workshop for the students there. We started our workshop with a presentation on DNA extraction to ensure the students understood the concepts of DNA extraction and would able to experience themselves the joyfulness of the experiments. After the presentation, the students were asked to form a group of five with the help of two facilitators in each group. The students in my group were very proactive and curious on how the experiments would be conducted. They asked several questions regarding the procedures and the concepts behind each step. I was truly impressed as they would not accept everything blindly but to understand the knowledge through asking questions throughout the process. This was very different from what I had seen in my secondary school. This had made me realise that a constant mutual interactive learning process is crucial for students to comprehend a specific topic well. The students were very excited and interested about the DNA extraction experiment and were amazed by the DNA they had extracted by their own.  

We continued the workshop with a quiz session guided by two MCs, Muiz and Koh. The students were so energetic and tried to answer before anyone did. I was too, felt very excited and delighted as the session went on. After that, the students were required to do a feedback form. Most of them were glad and hope to join such workshop in the future. The first workshop on DNA extraction ended well with photograph session.

Second day in SMK Lembah Subang was about DNA fingerprinting workshop. I could not wait to share my knowledge to the students and had fun with them. We started off the workshop with a presentation and continued with hands-on to find the criminal who had stolen a cheese. In this hands-on, I became the facilitator to a group of students which was different from the last workshop. The procedures were quite confusing for the students but we managed to explain the instructions with simple words to let them understand well. It was really good to see the students’ ardor in participation. 

One of my biggest challenge during these workshops was the language. I felt uncertain of some specific scientific phrases in Malay language as I was taught in English since I was in my secondary school. Fortunately, I was really grateful that I had my friends to help when I was in trouble to communicate with the students. We faced a big obstacle when we were told the students who participated the workshop were from art stream and they were taught in Malay language. They did not even been taught on basic DNA concepts by their teacher before this. However, what made me surprised was the attitude of the students. They paid full attentions to both the presentations and tried to understand the slides which were prepared in English. 

Throughout the workshops, I realised that engaging with different kind of people and even strangers, was not as scary as I thought before. Nevertheless, meeting new people, knowing each other and making friends were not a problem to cause my anxiety anymore. Being a part in the workshops made me realise how difficult it was like for a teacher to teach his or her students. This experience made me more appreciate and respect my teachers and lecturers. In a nutshell, I applaud to the hard work and teamwork of my teammates and also, thank to our Dr. Puah, Dr. Kee and Dr. Chai who helped us more than a lot. My gratitude to all the students from SMK Lembah Subang who participated the workshops and Miss Elliana who gave us this opportunity to carry out the workshops. 

(916 words)