Nur Sabrina bt Mohd Ropi (MIC180031)

Nur Sabrina bt Mohd Ropi (MIC180031) 

Reflective essay (12 April 2020) 

With the completement of Social Engagement’s first task, I find myself to benefit from variety of new things and skills that I learnt and developed throughout the process of making this programme a success. Some of the soft skills that I manage to polish are my communication skills and the ability to do some critical thinking. My friends and I are encouraged to interact with the students while doing the hands-on activities, which means that we need to be able to keep the conversation going by asking questions or explaining things to the students. This provide the opportunity to communicate effectively with the students by using the right choice of words so that they would be able to understand me and it somehow helps me to practice paying attention to the tone of voice, facial expression, body language and so on when interacting with others. Besides that, I also had a lot of discussion and exchanging idea session while doing the hands-on activities with the students. The students actively took part in doing the hands-on activities and sometimes came up with some absolute crazy ideas and opinions which I had to use my brain to do some critical thinking in order to support or deny their opinion with a making sense statement. Indeed, with hurdles came hidden strengths I discovered about myself.

Before we were able to conduct the programme, me and my friends need to attend an internal workshop. This is to give exposure on how to do the hands-on activities and helps us to get used to it. I also learn the principle of how things work and try to look from the students’ perspective so that I would be able to make the students understand the principle better in a simplified ways. It was very exciting and I look forward to meeting the students. Finally, the long awaited day has come, on 28th February, we conducted our programme at SMK (P) Sri Aman. The purpose of the programme was to share tiny bits of our knowledge on DNA extraction. I was feeling nervous when I first arrived at the school and quickly try to brush it off by getting my work done. Me and some of my friends set the laboratory up with things and equipments needed for hands-on activities later. When it’s time, we greeted the students cheerfully and honestly, I am feeling so excited to share my knowledge and have fun with the students. We had a short quiz session afterwards, which I think was a bit chaotic. The students were all hyped up for the prizes. I feel a bit unfair for the students at the back because they didn’t get the chances to answer the questions as the MC didn’t bother to look at their way. They look so demotivated. So, I whatsapped the MC to pick some students from the back and luckily, they notice my message. The programme took about 4 hours and it really drains my energy. Nevertheless, I still feel happy because of the effort that I put into this really worth the time and I couldn’t believe that I would actually be able to conduct such activity with success despite many shortcomings. After I went back home, I reflected on myself a lot. I feel proud of myself because I was able to give back to the society and really look forward to get involved with similar kind of programme as many as I can in the future. (592 words)