Post6

First, in this post, I would like to introduce my understanding of professional communication after the whole semester’s study.

Thinking is the basis of communication. Therefore, all the communications start from one’s self-consciousness of how to express idea clearly. In consulting industry, we define the interpretation of thinking process of as mental model. Mental model is an important factor in effective communication. When try to communicate with different individuals, we should enable to explain our idea clearly and strongly to the respondent; mental model should be varied with the talker’s culture, background, and what he/she is interested.

Professional communication should be with the good faith of the heart. Faith is the bridge to understand the feelings of others. The lack of sincerity of communication is inevitable with prejudices and misunderstandings. Therefore, the exchange of information is distorted.

During the process of learning, I tried to keep a good relationship with our classmates. After every week’s class release, I would go to have lunch with my classmates. Besides, I tried to participate in the class actively, organize the activities, and share my feelings via some of the social network.

The difficulty of second-language speaker is how to express your idea in that language, but not to translate it from your mother tongue to English. In my blog1, Mr. Blackstone mentioned that I had this problem and all this semester I tried to solve this problem. Finally, I found a very good method: trying to recount an article composed by native speaker. In the process, I would have learnt the “native” thinking process of English. I have kept doing this.

In our class, I am confident that my foundation should be weakest. Before I came, I even could not express my idea clearly. As for the usage of English, I always had some grammar errors and word misuse. Therefore, I quite cherished every opportunity that teacher and peers gave comments to my post and review towards my presentation: I have realized my progressing. I don’t feel frustrated about my current performance, by contrast, I have learned a lot from your review.

I know my English is far more to achieve excellent. However, from this course, I have learnt the basic idea about how to interact with individuals, how to handle complicated situation, the method to do a good OP, more importantly, and our group members have established an emotion link and become friends. I guess we have learnt the most essential part of communication: speak others with your heart.

post 5

It is my carelessness that I posted the comments on my own Blog. I will reply my comments on their blogs separately later.

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Generally speaking, I am satisfied with our group’s presentation last Thursday. As for our Moon-cake group, we valued this opportunity to express ourselves, and prepared a lot for the presentation. For example, the first edition of our slides, which had been composed by me, was discussed and modified several times by our group, finally achieving clear-style, straightforward, informative and interesting.

About my performance, this time I have paid attention to the weakness of my peer teaching pointed by Mr. Blackstone. I practiced pronunciation during my rehearsals; I tend to use accent during speaking; also I tried to spot my eye contacts to our classmates, I also paid attention to my position and standing posture, which tried to make sure, everyone’s version would not be blocked and felt comfortable. However, that afternoon I was exhausted and sometimes could not memorize what I needed to demo in the next, that I had to refer to the big screen behind me.  And one more weakness should be I believed I was too excited near the end, which would not be proper if the presentation were hold in a formal business occasion.

As for this course, I really appreciated the helps from all my classmates, as well as from Mr. Blackstone. As what I said in my post 1, I came this course for the sake of learning something, which enabled me more competitive in the future.

After one semester’s intensive training, I have learned a lot of useful from this course.  Before I came, I always had tense error and wrote a sentence without a clear meaning. But after Mr. Blackstone’s penitent instructions, now I can avoid most of tense errors and try to write a sentence in a concise way, with rather clear meaning.

Another memorable activity in the course should be mock job interview. As for our mock job interview, from the role switching between interviewer and candidate, I had understood the state of minds of both examiners and interviewees, which made me confident, and knew how to prepare, perform well during interview.

 

Peer Review of OP

Overall, Monday's groups performed good.

I want to give some comments to Tong. When he spoke, he noticed his gesture, body language, and this is good. Moreover he could care about whether the audience was listening him, which means he tried to interact with audience when he demonstrated.

However, His position, and some gestures looked unnatural. Haha, Maybe at that time he was a little bit nervous.

And One more comment I want to give Zongyang.

His presentation is fluent. As a Chinese fellow who also used English as second language, I think he must push a lot of efforts on preparing it.

However, when he spoke, he always shook his head with a frequency. This looks not so polite. And I found he also didn't get the response from class when he spoke, maybe he rehearsed too many times which leaded his speech like pulling out his memory.

His question answering part is fantastic, by the way.

By this weekends I will update this essay, and go through more details. Good night.

Post 4

About six months ago, an interesting book came to my eyes. The author, a Chinese American mother, in a mocking but somewhat interesting tone, told her American fellows how to educate their children into outstanding by a Asian-traditional way.

This book is called “tiger mother’s battle song”,  a child-raised autobiography by the Yale University law professor Amy Chua, whose two girls, Sophia and Lulu, both are excellent in instrument playing and have superior academic performances.

In the book,Amy described the way how she trained her daughters, which are different from what she saw as indulgent and permissive of Western parents: stressing academic performance, never accepting a mediocre grade, prohibiting sleepovers and school plays, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority.

She gave more details on her parenting: when her daughter showed disrespect to her, she would call her daughter “garbage”. And she thought it worked very well, because when her daughter got this, she would feel terrible and ashamed of what she had done. At the same time Amy believed there was no big harm to girls' self-esteem.

According to our Chinese culture, she didn’t feel anxious about children’s self-esteem. She required her kids that all the modules should get an ‘A’. When they were not able to get a good mark, she would say:”You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” Like ordinary Chinese mother, she would grasp in horror, and ask her girl what went wrong. Also when her girls did wrong, she would called them ”stupid”,”worthless” or “a disgrace”.

Miss Chua’s book triggered a fierce discussion by suggesting that her tough approach to parenting. In United States, most comments accused her parenting way as “unhealthy, incomprehensible and incredible“which they thought are detrimental to the development of kids' independent personalities.

However, this book was quickly translated into Chinese and became one of the best-sellers. Most buyers of Chinese mothers said Amy Chua was their role model to follow. they were confident that their children could be as “excellent” as Amy’s when they followed her methods.

This is one scenario of culture gap: the mother admirable oriental became being accused in the west. One more example should be Chinese medicine: acupuncture，”qi” are considered to be anti-science in the west.

Just like what we discussed in the class last week, culture can be defined as thinking manner which a certain group of people contains. Thus, when an idea is encouraged in China, it just means this idea is corresponding to the thinking way most Chinese has, but this thinking way may not be accepted in United States.

Although culture is not passed through gene biologically, it must be created by one great mind of the ethnic, is able to pass from one generation to another. For example, the Chinese culture is based on Confucius’s philosophy. Although it was modified several times during long history, you can still find the similarities between the Confucius ideas and Chinese’s thinking manner. Moreover, the freedom and democracy which modern Americans advocate, do not have essentially different with the idea of Thomas Jefferson raised 400 years ago.

There is a metaphor that you have jumped into a color vat since you began to be educated, that color is your culture. you kept absorbing the ideas of your own culture from every person in the surroundings: your friends, parents, teachers,  And you would reflect it on your attitudes and behaviors. This is why, when cultures conflict, hard for others to convert you and in your side you may think his painstaking persuading as a severe offense.

Therefore, I don’t think there is a possible way to carry real inter-culture communications. If there is, that could be applied and most of wars would be avoided.  So when different culture conflict, ones would show strong disapproval to others even if some are a very good persuader. Culture is pre-installed into every individual’s system, cannot be significantly, easily changed just after one or two times short talks.

My advise is when we try to communicate with individuals from different cultures, we should show respect to other’s culture, though you may not agree; When we travel to another country, do as Romans do; When we talk with ones who have different culture backgrounds, we tend to find some topics in common instead of something may cause a culture debate.

post 3

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 WEN YIDA
                                                                     Blk 302 Clementi West 1
                                                                     Singapore 120302






Mere Curt Siegel
Associate Director of Admission
B University School of Management




Dear Miss Siegel,
I am writing this letter to apply for the two-years graduate study of Mathematical Finance in B University,and ask for consideration of scholarship.


Firstly, I was considered to be one of the top students in a world leading university.  I have recently graduated from National University of Singapore with a first-class honor bachelor degree of computer engineering.In University, I kept good academic performance, played a key role in a multitude of student communities&activities, and acted as a project leader for many times.


Further, I have owned several internship experiences from international companies in different fields, all of them are world top 500. In summer of 2011, I worked as an intern in IBM IT consulting department; In winter of 2011, I worked as an intern in management consulting department of Accenture Co, under the supervision of Mr xxx, the executive manager of Accenture Co of the big Chinese region; in summer of 2012, I worked as an intern in Credit Suisse financial department in Hongkong, and my project focused on quality controls of financial products.


Last but not the least, I have developed diverse competitive skills which recognized by public. I have basic financial knowledge. In university, I have took both basic economics(EC1301) and financial  accounting(ACC1002X) modules with good grades. Further, in 2012, I passed the CFA (Chartered Financial analyst ) level-1 test. Moreover, my English is good, with large vocabulary and rigorous logic thinking ability. I got 8 out of 9 of IELTS test and got 1540(verbal 740) from GRE test.


I have an outgoing, industrious personality with strong sense of responsibility and good leadership skills. In addition, I am a self-disciplined person and tend to lead a regular life. I keep a good social network with almost all my colleagues and classmates during intern and study; and during my intern, I was appreciated by different supervisors several times and you can find their recommendation letters in attachment.


It is worth taking into consideration that I have already been selected as a preferred candiate by your staff in last year. I really have a strong interest in financial area, want to understand financial market, and pursue interests so that can save more people in need,especially those in China.I believe, by this two years program, I will make a difference and realize my American dream.


Thanks for your consideration. I am looking forward to your early reply.




Sincerely,
  


Yida

Announcement

Due to the Great Fire Wall(GFW) of Chinese government, I cannot visit blogger.com during my stay in Beijing. So the update and reply of comments of post 2 and post 1 would be conducted after Tuesday when I come back to Singapore.


Due to Mr Blackstone's advice, these days I try to get though the book: the element of style, to shape my writing skills.


Good Weekends
    Yida

post 2

This is a war between a boss and his secretary. This is a war without a winer. This is a war drawing large attention and heat debate of local Beijinese.

It all started with Soon Choo Loke, the chief of EMC China, a Singaporean Chinese.  He sent an email to his secretary Rebecca (Hu Rui) complaining that he was locked out.

From: Loke, Soon Choo

Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 1:13 AM

To: Hu, Rui
Cc: Ng, Padel; Ma, Stanley; Zhou, Simon; Lai, Sharon

Subject: Do not assume or take things for granted
           
Rebecca, I just told you not to assume or take things for granted on Tuesday and you locked me out of my office this evening when all my things are all still in the office because you assume I have my office key on my person. 
With immediate effect, you do not leave the office until you have checked with all the managers you support - this is for the lunch hour as well as at end of day, OK?

Apparently Rebecca felt angry about the charge: Everyday she worked so hard; even sometimes she need to sacrifice her private time to work overtime. She still remembered she had planned to hang out with her boyfriend in Valentine's day last year:but she received an unexpected phone call from Loke to draft a project proposal. She said nothing but worked the whole night. After she came back, she found her boyfriend had already fell asleep. She didn’t understand why she devoted so much to the company and the boss, but in return she always got complains and abuses. She could not control her emotion at that moment; she began to weep. After she calmed down, she made a hard decision and replied an E-Mail with harsh language in Chinese:

Soon Choo,
First, What I did is absolutely right. Out of concern for security, I locked the door. It is not that it didn’t happen here in Beijing things got lost. If it happens, I can’t afford to take the responsibility.

Second, you have your own key. You forgot to take it with you and now you blame others for it. The reasons for this incidents are all from yourself and don’t shift your own mistakes to others.

Thirdly, you don’t have rights to control my private time. I work here for 8 hours a day. Please remember the lunchtime and the time after work are all mine, my private time.

Forth, since I joined EMC, I have been working diligently to fulfill my responsibilities. I worked overtime too many times without complaint. But if you ask me to work overtime for things that are not part of my job description, I can’t do that.

Fifth, though our relationship is that of a supervisor and a subordinate, but please pay the attention to the way you speak. This is the most fundamental courtesy of human being.

Sixth, let me emphasize here, I didn’t assume anything or take anything for granted. I don’t have time or necessity to do that.

Rebecca didn’t just send the email to Loke. At that moment, she felt extremely disappointed with her Boss.Her instinction and justice drived her to tell peers a truth: you worked for which kind of person. She finally hold up the courage, and clicked the CC button, having sent an E-mail to all the staffs in China branch: even those worked in Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou offices.

The News spread fast from esoteric to public. One month later,  The story was published on a widely-spread local newspaper.  This news recurred heat debate among locals.  The responses were divided: Some hailed her as a hero, calling her the most audacious secretary in the history (the most cow vagina one). Some insiders also complained about Mr. Loke for being arrogant in the company. Mr. Loke took part in the IT business for over 20 years, and been working for IBM, Siemens, and Oracle. Some complained that the first things he did when he joined Oracle and EMC, he reshuffled all the important posts and gave them to people from Taiwan and Hongkong.

Others said Rebecca has been spoilt by those foreign companies. She has been working for some big name international companies. Some questioned if she would dare to do things similar in a Chinese company. It also rumored that she has been fired from EMC and she was quoted as saying that she could not find a job now.

Dear friend, as for your opinion, who should be responsible for this incident? What they were supposed to do to attain a win-win situation before this happened? Or if you were the  secretary or boss, what you would do at that moment? Thank you.