Post 6: Mr Darren Zheng's Biodata

I am Darren Zheng, a year 4 Mechanical Engineering student in the National University of Singapore. I have worked in various places in China like Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, which have broaden my horizon and experience to work. I speak fluent Chinese, possess a global outlook and enjoy travelling and interacting with people of different cultures.

I embrace leadership roles with passion and responsibility. I head a committee of 30 people for NUS openhouse Eusoff Hall, that received critical appreciation. In 2008, I was also the Sepak Takraw captain, and lead the team to a first and second finish in the Inter-Faculty Games.

Working as a medic during my National Service, I picked up leadership roles like being the OPS Room in-charged and had to handle medical and aircrafts emergencies. This role has help me equiped myself with strong situation management skills and good communicating skills.

I have a strong passion for music since young. I play the piano and have also won singing competition over the years. My dream would be to start a Seafood restuarant, as I love to see the smiles on people's face when that enjoy their food.

Reflecting on the Research Project Experience

Our research project is titled 'Handling of unwanted lecture notes in NUS through an implementation of a paper collection service'. I had a positive learning experience doing this project as it helped me to better interact with people of the opposite gender (as my other previous projects in NUS were all with male project mates). People coming from different cultural backgrounds would also add flavour to the project as they offer different view points. I also learnt problem solving and how to retrieve and work with the information I have, and this really helped me to understand more about myself in terms of work capability.

Having clear communication is important as we can be more efficient in working on our individual parts. Clear communication would help to prevent misunderstandings from arising when everyone understands what they have to do.

Healthy interpersonal relationships are important to a group. It was comfortable to work with my group members as we could clique well and I would try to crack jokes when every one gets tired to liven up the atmosphere.

I would say that all the members in my group are team players. We come from different faculties, and when my other group member had midterms, I would volunteer to do more work and they would reciprocate when it was time for my midterms.

In the process of research, it was not smooth sailing for my group. We encountered problems of not being able to find articles about our topic, and the people from CSC were not responsive to our emails and enquiries.

Writing a report is not as simple as just writing down what results you have. You have to interpret the data according to the survey and from there, implement something that would be most welcomed within our limitations. This is no simple task as we will have to consider many factors before coming to a decision.

For a effective oral presentation, it is important to understand the communication process so that the audience can enjoy what you are presenting. Also, it is important to have good writing language to ensure the audience would understand what is written on the slides during presentation. Lastly, oral presentation skills are essential for effective communication.

Usually, presentations might not be as good when the presenters are stuck at questions posted by the audience. We should prepare answers that audience might ask to prevent a communication break down.