Biodata

Zoelyn is a second year chemistry student in NUS who aspires to be a forensic scientist. She wants to learn how to be a good forensic scientist and helps those who died unnaturally and cannot speak up for themselves. Her second ambition is to teach in special schools to help the disabled children.

Zoelyn is also an active volunteer and has been with Nee Soon East CC Youth Executive Committee since she was in junior college. She has since then organised many meaningful events such as bringing the less fortunate children to pony rides, bring the disabled children to zoo and pay monthly visits to old folks’ homes.
Being a youth volunteer, she is often exposed to different kinds of community events which make her more mature and passionate in what she is doing. She enjoys helping people, serving the community and she has made many good friends that share the same passion as her.

Zoelyn is also is very concerned with matters involving her friends and family, such that she always makes it a point to spend them with them even if she is tied up with volunteer and school work. She values kinship and friendship and always lends a listening ear.

Open Topic: Other Communication Issues

Active listening is an important form of communication which I feel is necessary and may affect us in our everyday life. Many a time, people tend to misinterpret or misunderstand some things due to the lack of listening attentively.
Here is one scenario that I would like to share with all of you.

It was a meet-up with my project group mates to discuss about the details of how we were going to present our ideas to the audience through a presentation. As usual, ideas were brought up and different opinions were discussed before reaching to a final decision. After which, we split the workload and everyone was allocated with different parts of the presentation slides. I was nominated to compile all the presentation slides on top of my workload.

As this was a big group that consisted of eight people, not all of us were present during the discussion. We then got Ben, a good friend of Jason to inform him of his allocated slides, the next meeting time and venue. The next meeting was to edit all of our slides before the actual presentation.

However, problems arose when it was the due date for all the slides to be sent to me for the final compilation and I failed to receive Jason's part. Feeling frustrated, I called Jason to find out what was wrong and was shocked to hear that he did not get to know of any updates from the meeting much so his part of work. I then told him the necessary information he need to know before calling Ben to confirm his side of story.I was quite pissed with his response when he merely said,”Sorry, I didn’t catch that part of information”. It then dwelled on me that Ben had not done his part of informing Jason, resulting in me having to take a longer than expected time to compile all the slides and Jason having to rush out the slides.

This scenario that I have mentioned is a problem of inactive listening that every one of us will face in one way or another. It is very common for us to missed out important parts of the information if active listening was not practised which may result in problems and inconvenience for the rest of the group.

In my opinion, this is the most common scenario of lack of active listening and I believe every one of us here will have experience it. Do you agree with me?

Evaluating Intercultural Behaviour

In different countries, there are different practices and cultures. This is what makes every country unique from each other. Within each country, many different kinds of ethnic groups can also be found. For my post today, I will evaluate on a culture that is practiced in by one of the ethnic groups in Southern China.

Well, so much for the introduction, the ethnic group that I am going to talk about is 女儿国 (Daughter of the country), which is found in Yun Nan. Like the name of the group suggests, only women live in their society there are some people that hailed this place "the mysterious daughter of the East country," The interesting practice that women in this ethnic group do is that they will spend seven nights with seven different men on the bed and all they do is chit-chat for the night. They believe this is a good way to know a man.

This culture practice is something totally different from Singapore. In Singapore, we have a different mode of meeting the opposite gender. There are a high percentage of women that are working and sometimes their only way that get to interact with men are during work or even going on blind dates (though not common) that might have been arranged by match-making agencies or even parents.

This culture was what I find very interesting and totally different from the culture in Singapore and they also have a special dance that both men and women will dance together to express their love for the opposite gender. Women in Singapore do not have difficulty knowing people from the opposite gender considering the fact that they are more independent, out-spoken and given the fact that they have more opportunity to meet the opposite gender. Perhaps, the women in女儿国 will have this practice as they might have difficulty getting to know men or they may be generally shy since they are constantly in the company of women.

However, I feel that a culture is what makes the group or a country unique from one another. Therefore, even if I may feel that such a practice in女儿国 is not necessary because I feel that they are a lot better ways to know a guy, nevertheless, I must still respect the culture that they have.