Week 9: Final thoughts on RW

 Hi all,

The final week has come and all ICU students’ faces (of course mine is also) have been getting dark, exhausted, stressed, and even desperate…  I hope all of us will overcome the exams, presentations, and essays…

Anyways, I would like to reflect on this Research Writing course in this post, looking back on each activities which we did.

Usual classes

I really enjoyed every class. This was because Ken provides many various activities for us, such as lectures from Ken, discussions, watching videos, role-play games, and so forth. We learned about interpersonal communication, negotiation skills, conflict resolution, and of course, about leadership as well. Though this class, my image of a leader was dramatically changed. I thought the leader had strong authority, tough, and has charisma, of course this was one type of a leader but leaders can be more like a person who cares about others or encourages them as well. To put in another way, I came to understand that there were many leadership styles though this class.

Guest speaker lectures

We, fortunately, had two guest lectures in this course. One was the lecture by Rab, and the other was by Brent A. Conkle. Each lectures was really terrific and I leaned a lot from their lectures. For example, I learned that leaders needed to deal with a problem from various perspectives or approaches from Rab’s lecture. I also noticed that I tended to spend more time to “discuss” than “take action”. Moreover, from Brent’s lecture I understood that I was more like an “integrator” or a “developer” leader. This assessment helped me to find my advantages and disadvantages as well. Overall, these two lectures provided me much knowledge of leadership and I will utilize it to my everyday life.

Essay

Yes. We did it. We finally finished writing a 2000 word essay! At first I thought 2000 words were really long but now I feel that it is “not so long” (but not “short” at all lol). My topic was “empathy and cultural empathy” and since the topic was related to my interest, that is, intercultural communication, I truly enjoyed searching for the sources and writing an essay. I, initially and personally, regarded “empathy” as a soft and not-required skill for the leaders (that was why I decided to write an essay about this topic) but though my research, I learned what an important role the empathy plays in leadership skill. Furthermore, I got more and more interested in intercultural communication as well.

Blog

At first, keeping a blog was the most troublesome task for me. This was because I had not write a blog before and just personally I was reluctant to write (especially make a summary to tell the truth..). However, once I began blogging, I found that it was somewhat interesting to do. Moreover, what I felt important and beneficial was that we could see others’ thoughts, reactions and feeling by checking others’ blogs. I guess this encouraged and motivated me to study.

Presentation

On Friday, our group made a presentation. Our topic was like “leadership not from charisma”, and since each members’ topics had little similarities, it was a kind of difficult to conduct one presentation but anyways I was glad to finish it. Overall, group presentations were really great opportunity for us to know about others’ topics and moreover, I could learn some presentation skills from others’ presentation as well.

Classmates and Ken

Finally, I would like to look back my classmates and also our teacher, Ken. Everyone was (and is) really warm, friendly, and nice so that I really liked to come the class room and see all of my classmates and my teacher as well. I cannot thank you guys enough truly. Especially Ken, you were the most kindest teacher I met ever! I truly appreciate all of your kindness. So what I would like to say is……

 Hope to see you again guys~ muchisimas gracias!!