Blog 2: Resolving Interpersonal Conflict

For the module ME3102, your group of 5 was required to manufacture a robot designed earlier last semester. There was a peer assessment at the middle and the end of the semester, and individual grades were assigned by your group’s professor in charge. Your group was further divided into two subgroups. Fiona, Alex and Jessica were assigned to tackle the electronics whereas Charles and yourself were assigned to handle the mechanics of the robot.

Charles and yourself are good friends who have known each other since junior college. You met him twice a week in the manufacturing lab in school while group meetings took place fortnightly. During the course of the module, Charles became attached to Lydia, the senior whom he had admired since junior college days. Charles began to skip the lab sessions with the excuse that he had to keep Lydia company, but continued attending the group meetings.

You confronted Charles and he assured you that everything was on track. 1 week after the confrontation, Charles produced an assembled chassis with fully working mechanisms. He had engaged the help of his father, who owns an engineering firm. You know this was solely the work of his father’s employees.

You also found out that the rest were having problems with the electronics due to the tedium of programming and circuiting. You suggested to Charles to inform the rest that your part had been completed and Charles and yourself could help them out. However, Charles warned you not to tell the rest about the outsourced completed job so that he could continue spending time with Lydia without being labeled as a free rider. At this stage, the project was due in 3 weeks time.

What would you have done so that the robot would be completed on time and each individual’s grade was a true reflection of his/her effort?

Blog 1:Effective Communication

I love meeting and interacting with new people. I am not your stereotypical engineer who is absorbed in the world of diagrams and graphs and calculations. I have since been looking for a job which allows me to be constantly interacting with different people, hopefully from different backgrounds. However, with constant communication, there will be an increased potential for miscommunication. This will result in loss of information, misinterpretation of data and in a worse scenario, misunderstanding of true intentions. I have had bad experiences of spoilt friendships due to poor communication and though its been almost a decade, the regret still lingers in me. Practice would certainly improve communication skills and if I could go back to the past, much could be salvaged. The phrase “sit down and talk things out” sounds so cliché, but the fact that it is used so commonly proves that the best solution to complexities is to communicate. When I was in Austin last year, I attended a rally by former US president Bill Clinton. I had the opportunity to be standing right in front of the podium. I noticed how effective he was in reaching out to the crowd, his hand gestures, his tone, and his postures. This is the product of being able to communicate effectively. Although I wasn’t voting back then, I was indeed attracted to review his wife’s potential policies. Good communication skills would definitely complement the great ideas you want to bring across and I certainly want my ideas in the future to be noticed and taken seriously.