Post #2: Observation of team behaviour: intercultural and interpersonal communication

When I was in my primary school, we, the students used to bring food from home to the school for lunch. In my class, we like to share our food to show friendship. Once I tried to share my food with one of my friends, but she refused my request. I felt a little upset, because I thought she might dislike me. After some time, she even changed her seat (she was my deskmate) and said she could not stand the smell of my lunch. I was angry because she looked down upon me and my mother’s cooking. Since then, I seldom talked with her and we did not keep touch with each other after graduation. Not long afterward, I found out that she is a Manchu, a race in China whose people never eat pork (I ate pork often in my primary school) or share the food with others. Not until then did I realize that it was I who was impolite to her. I did not know her custom and was kind of rude to her.

I learnt a lot from this lesson. Sometimes our ignorance will hurt someone and it cannot be an excuse. I believe most of us have heard of this proverb “Do in Rome as the Romans do.” We follow the custom in each place not just for our own convenience or intercommunion, but also to show respect to their local custom. When contacting with just one person, we still need to consider his habits and try not to be rude to someone. Therefore, next time, before you judge someone, you should learn more about him or his race and consider your own behavior.

Post #1: Communication and teamwork

There is no doubt about the importance of communication to people's lives. In the book "Robinson Crusoe", Crusoe helps a prisoner to escape, later naming his new companion "Friday". I think the most important reason why Crusoe helps him is not the desire of obtaining one or two servants, but the wish, prompted by loneliness, of being accompained by others, who even cannot speak English.

It is people's normal demand to communicate with each other. Therefore, it is not hard to understand that it is really cruel and severity to put a prisoner in solitary without communication with anyone.

Back to topic, why communication and teamwork is important to an engineering student like me. As the above mentioned, as a person, any of us must and have to communicate. Moreover, as a person who is involved different kinds of relationship with family, friends, teammates(which is mainly discussed in this module) or workmates, an engineer has to learn how to deal with teamwork. To apply teamwork properly, we need communication. Now, we can figure out that teamwork is based on good communication and neither of them can be ignored.

Communication is part of our lives, but it does not mean that we can communicate well. In fact, most of us have some disadvantage(s) over communication. And this is one of the reasons for us to take this module in NUS, not just for graduation, but also for our better future. Though teamwork is also quite important, we should focus on how to improve our communication skills for us to communicate effectively in a team and I believe we will make great progress at the end of this module.