Reflection on Team-based Research Project Proposal

In a short span of nine weeks, our team has worked together on the issue of improving the recycling culture in Singapore. Recollecting what we had went through as a team, I must admit that it wasn’t an easy one, but the experience was rather fulfilling.

At the beginning, I was quite hyped up for this project as many interesting topics were brought up. Moreover, I’m working with friends whom I’m not familiar with, and I thought that this would be a great opportunity to for me to experience different working styles and thought processes.

I felt that meeting on Google docs was rather effective as we all shared our viewpoints and disagreements openly. As such, we were able to manipulate our ideas immediately and made better progress. However, typing out our ideas has its limitations, as we were unable to express what exactly we want to say. A way to overcome this problem would be to clarify our ideas through phone calls or to talk face-to-face after lessons. 

On the other hand, meeting up face-to-face was less productive as the three of us are rather soft-spoken people. Personally, I tend to keep opinions to myself for the fear of offending other’s ideas. However, because of our quiet personality, I felt a need to break out of my comfort zone. I started to voice out my opinions and took the initiative to instruct our next course of action. Initially, I felt rather uneasy doing so as I was afraid that my teammates might see me as a bossy person. (I hope that my group mates understand where I’m coming from.) As time goes by, we became more vocal and contributed our ideas openly.

Writing of proposal was the most challenging part of this project. Due to our different schedules, we were unable to find suitable timeslot whereby we can meet and clarify our doubts on the parts which we were assigned to do. Thankfully, before splitting the work, we did a rough outline on what information should go into which sections and we were able to refer to this outline whenever needed. We also utilized the time given to us during lessons to discuss on how we can make improvements to our proposed solutions and to ensure that all of us are aware of the changes made in our proposal.

We decided to split our work based on our strengths. For instance, as Jacob has a strong command for English, he worked on the conclusion, which was one of the most important sections of the report, as it has to sound impactful and convincing. Also, since Vivian was well informed about the current affairs in Singapore and other parts of the World, she took up the challenge to write the background of our proposal. After each of our sections are done, we read through the whole proposal together to ensure that our report has met the 7Cs in writing - Complete, clear, concrete, correct, concise, courteous and coherent.

Overall, working as a team has taught me both soft skills and hard skills that will prepare me for the workplace. It is important that we voice our opinions and be receptive to feedbacks because, we will be working with people who are more experienced when we step out into the working world. Their feedbacks will definitely help us improve our performance at work as well as the quality of work we produce.