Mission completed

18th and 19th May

Saying bye

The hotel may thought efficiencies about us as a group booking, however the check-out sheet delivered to each room was excellent. Thankfully we were able to frame out about departure of each one of us by check-out time, flight departure time, destination, possibly flight time, who's leaving first, who'll be the last etc.

At 10:00 pm, many of us without prearrangement voluntarily gathered to say bye to first leavers to Sydney and Austin.
Hour later we were came down again to say bye to them heading for Japan at 11:00pm
Then I finally hugged rest of them to prepare for myself leaving on early next morning.
I am sure they may have gathered a couple of times more up until last member standing.
(Sorry to her)

Returning to Sydney

My departure was very smooth, a member rang me me unexpectedly to say bye in last minute.
Checking-out, pay,rent for extra, their transport.. everything went smoothly until I stood for boarding pass at the Emirates desk.
They need to check why my recent reissued passport is not linked to Australian visa.
What? How could that happen as I left there a month ago?
No one answered for 20 minutes to the calls from the ticket counter. My brain began to spin to measure all the possibilities.
However, no longer drama. They sorted it out. Big relief.

It was another sharp 14 hours flight and famous A380 super jumbo.
There is a menu named 'As you like - chocolate bar'.
Because I saw that the plane has in-flight bar I thought that is the bar. But it turned out a choco-bar.
What a dazzling glare from the crew when I asked them where the bar is.
Yes, it was the assumption based on short judgement we needed to battle during the assignment.
That happening may not only because of the language of 'bar'.

Done.

My shiny CSC assignment ended with waking up call by cabin crew announcing of landing in Sydney. 

Making smart ranking questions

Running survey through students was critical to know them; their awareness level, their preferred channel of information source, demographics etc.

While preparing survey questions to them one thing we clearly missed was their convenience.

One of survey question was to ask them to rank 1 to 16 with 16 different preferred channel.

Any student may have two or three most preferred choices, but picking one as most preferred and putting the others in second or third will be harder job. Furthermore ranking rest of 13 indifferent channels from 4 to 16 can be such an irritating job. How dare you ask me to do it?

Clearly we don't need to know if how much are all of those each16 channel interested in. It is just OK to know top 5 or if really needed just top 3 and least 3 are acceptable.
Confessing I am not sure if we set up the measure.

Instead of asking to rank 1-16 mandatory, if we asked them to choose 1) top5, or 3) top 3 and least 3, data quality would have been much better as they would have not such pain to choose 1-16.

We were not smart enough to ask ranking questions.

Feel sorry and thank to students who participated survey.

Survival school

I cannot remove the wistful feeling of the last period of the school in Sydney, because the course came to an end when I felt I was really taking off and up in the air.

First year of the school was really terrible simply because I never succeeded to take ride on the group discussion. 80% of learning in business school is through talk, listen and write in the group. That's it.

Part time students in the tertiary school are highly motivated. They come to school with strong intention to learn what they intend. Also most assignment is to write a group report; group research is half and group writing is the other half. They talked very fast and I couldn't not pick at all.

Hence what they usually do during the first day of lecture is exploring who to form a team with.
 A team? Making a team is impromptu job.  If you lose a fraction of concentration on the climate of the class room? you will be left easily alone.Who will pro-actively be willing to approach to form a team with an Asian looking man who happens to speak English so poorly? Actually no one.

In fact they had no need to take care of me who never be attractive for good group mark.

Making a team was so stressful back then. I felt I completed half the subject if I just managed to be in a team within teaming dead line. Any professor who didn't delegate students to form a team on their own, but announced prearranged team was my favorite.


In general, many English native speakers have wrong assumption, which worked mostly disadvantageous to me, is that poor English speaker might possess poorer writing skills in English. No evidence at those days however some colleague students seemed to suspect my intellectual readiness to learn in English by the assumption. I came to know later on that  even they feel stressful to good writing requirement Among native English speakers if you have good writing skills you'll be very admired in the academic.Yes, it will be same to any language. Everyone admires who has good writing skills in their native language.
 
After struggling of a year or so, I found myself start talking to them, stop them to listen to me, sometime debate over them, and lead conversation. Also I learned how to get things done without deep involvement but not losing focus.

Those days experience really work for me for this project. That's for sure what I learned those days was not just English but social skills of how to deal with better English speakers than myself.

Last 3.5 weeks' work reminded me the lengthy hard time of 2008. And now I have same wistful feeling of taking off to the sky.

Master chefs after bakery class

Another enjoyable in CSC is experiencing something new that you may not try in the home country.
It may possibly come from relatively relaxed half tourist mind.

These folks joined a cake baking class by squeezing out of busy assignment.

They might have plotted out behind the corner to appear as natural and surprise us.

It worked.
They sneaked in one by one as if nothing but they are professional bakeries with authentic look; wearing white garment with tall chef hat. Then, busted out laughs.

It's shame they couldn't bring some cakes, but I will never forget this smile on their faces.

Interim review

The projects is going half way through.

1) Through the interim review with client today, we could present and demonstrate our progress on schedule.
First of all good things is that we could show them our readiness against their question and comments.
Also we are glad that weaknesses of SWOT seems fully delivered to them.

That means to convince the client and to increase chance of acceptance from them.

2) First survey  result came out.
It is always exciting to analyze data. This is nothing but to challenge assumptions and to verify.
Outstanding assumption we consistently pegged on was gender difference.
Because clear divide was observed during interviews with female and male students.
For example, male students are consistently considered more aware of eGovenment services during the interview

With the result, at first glance is that female responders outnumbers male responders.
What does that mean? Does this mean that female students will be more responsive for a promotion?
Awareness on eGovenment services turned out not much biased across gender.
It comes out current awareness level of female and male are pretty same. First assumption with gender bias looks wrong.

More analysis will be done. However verifying assumptions and adjusting them are most fun part of the project.

Community day: entrepreneurship workshop

Volunteering in volunteering.

Nine of CSC members participated as volunteer in entrepreneurship workshop for female business students of UOS. I was in team 7- they are all lively young, energetic and focused.

Their starts-up business plan was to make a water activity resort in remote area in Sharjah where mountains meet beach. Idea storming, Goal setting, answering to 6Ws, etc, they were quite structured and saw through what they were doing. Seems they are well exposed to many business issues through text book such as uncertainties, innovations, financial terms and concepts.

In particular ideas that selling sun blocking umbrella and building a water theme resort in remote area to contribute local community are impressive.

Someday some of them will be leaders of the nation and may be changing the rule of the game. Until then, wish they keep their dream and develop their capability.