Thoughts & Musings

Having been exposed to various parts of the education sector during my university journey such as curriculum development and marketing for a tuition centre and formal tutoring of not only science subjects but languages, I decided to take on UTOP with Dr Linda so that I can be exposed to these areas in an academic and tertiary setting. The programme was complete from the course held by CDTL and mentorship training that SPS exposes us to, I believe that I am privileged as well to take on multiple roles for this UTOP for the course SP3275 : Science for a Sustainable Earth in its pioneer run. The roles that I have been exposed to include curriculum development, mentor coordination, assessment, and teaching.

As we had taken this course under a different name pre-CHS, it was important for this revamp to align to the objectives of the new programme, as well as to take in the feedback of previous runs to improve this course. The curriculum development team was headed by myself as I coordinated and gathered the strengths of other mentors in SPS to co-create this new curriculum, this interaction between the staff and student mentors is very valuable and it is made known to all the students in SPS. This gives students the confidence that the feedback that they give will be taken in and they are much more open and receptive to ideas and innovation. This also gives them some sense of belonging and motivation to perhaps become a mentor in the future.

This was a difference experience compared to my other working experiences as tutoring in a tuition centre has more of a results driven / business aspect whereas here it feels more that as a student mentor we are empowered to help guide students learning and play a more active role in helping students achieve their own academic goals. What is different from traditional courses is that in SPS we have the mentorship system where students always have someone they can look for help and someone who can act as the bridge between students and staff. This helped me to develop some interpersonal skills as I have always been a very hard-headed and straightforward person to not impose my expectations onto other people. Ultimately, we want students to have fun and be able to remember at least one thing from the module and impart skills that are transferable to other areas be it for research or teaching.

I also had the opportunity to work on assessment and feedback. This is actually one of my pedagogical interests apart from Science and Languages, which is assessment pedagogy. It was interesting to work on the assessment modes, rubrics, and writing feedback for the students. This was done for their learning journals for two lab experiments conducted where I had written feedback in two parts, general feedback to the cohort and individual targeted feedback for everyone. Feedback is definitely more important to any individual than merely the grades that they receive.

In conclusion, this experience was beneficial not only to my learning but also hopefully to the students that took this course. In university I am more in my exploratory phase to understand more about the fields of research that I am interested in (or eliminate those I am not) and also to work on education, which I foresee myself ending up in the future. All these skills from teaching, mentoring, and management are all useful skills that I have benefited from in this programme.

Whenever it comes to asking me so #whySPS ? I would go into my Head Mentor advertisement speech that I give at every orientation camp slot to the extent that I even (maybe I shouldn’t have) started describing the benefits of the programme during an interview (and I didn’t get through anyway). My journey in SPS began because while I was serving the nation, my one and only JC classmate who was in NUS Science told me to join it because it was “cool”. Turns out two years later when I successfully entered the programme and I didn’t see her, she told me that she dropped out after Year 1. And here I am, the current Head Mentor of SPS in AY 23/ 24.

Maybe let’s look more at my mentoring journey in SPS. Becoming a mentor was an opportunity to tone down. Many people probably would know me as the loudest guy in the room or rather before coming into the room because people can tell that I am here. Not too sure whether it’s the noise or the aura, whichever it is, my presence was always made known. I started off with all these ideas and things in my head, putting together whatever I have done on internship with respect to teaching and curriculum development, and then looking at the state of the module that I was roped into helping. We had a solid idea and I think it could definitely have been better but I am very proud to think that that was really the best version of the module of the 4 years in SPS that I have seen. I was also quite happy that my suggestion of replacing one of the components of another module to be the prequel of their research module was quite well received after some modifications done by the module coordinator and with the suggestions of the rest of the staff and HM team.

Definitely, mentoring came with its many interesting events. Shortly after becoming Head Mentor, we dove right into managing a lot of things instantly becoming the HR team for mentor selections and year 1 admissions. We got to meet a lot of different individuals and they gave us their ideas and thoughts of entering the programme be it as a mentor or as a student. Unfortunately, we cannot give the spot to everyone as others met the description better than others. I do enjoy such HR work actually, and the design of the admissions process was actually rather exciting. I did originally propose the idea and we got through some refinement of the activities in the HM team. 

Of course not everything goes smoothly, the module that I was so proud of started to crumble with the lack of communication and planning with our collaborator and clearly we had different concepts of what this collaboration is supposed to be about. Nonetheless, with the great team that we had, we managed to make things happen in the end and I am really very happy to have worked with two wonderful Junior Mentors who practically led the discussions for the fieldwork.

People wise, I for some reason became a “counsellor”. Students looked for me whenever they needed help be it in academics or in their mental wellbeing. I had to sit down for about an hour just understanding a student’s situation and coming up with some plans to move forward together or at least how they can move ahead while trying to manage their emotions. I got shouted at outside on Frontier Green for a whole 20 min and at that point I thought that actually it was a bit embarrassing but 20 seconds later I was like it’s fine, this guy is unhappy and at least he gets to vent all his frustrations on me. We worked out a way to get things sorted out, I admit that we were at fault and there could have been a better way to resolve the problem, I also advised them to better control their feelings and while it was good that they could vent, I am not too sure if they can do that in the future without facing any repercussions. Some of the students have also approached me about other things related to my passions in languages and are all so willing to teach me theirs ! I am so happy.

I’ve always known that I am not the brightest fella in the bunch nor the most science-y / research-y person in the batch. That’s fine. It’s honestly reassuring to know that there are people around who can do the work better and that I can learn from them and that I can trust my team to get the job done. Well of course it’s not that I don’t do anything, but there are things that we each can take care of independently, and we all trust that we will all take care of the things that we can do.