The last battle...

I realised I'm getting lazier to blog these days. I used to have at least one post per month and now I only blog once a few months. This laziness is partly attributable to my examinations in college. Things just getting harder and harder as I enter the last part of my ACCA qualification. I started to fail my papers despite studying consistently, it's quite disheartening sometimes.

After all the hardships I had been through for the past few weeks, I only get a miserable two-weeks break!! Anyway, I joined my friends for few days holiday trip as usual. This time we went to ipoh and penang to try out the local food and visited some places as well.

I can conclude those places in one sentence:
Ipoh is full of mad people and Penang people are mostly ill-mannered.

On the other hand, time passes so quickly to the extend that I can't believe that I'm in the last semester after my holidays!! I feel old suddenly and I can't help to think of the kind of job I'll be doing after I graduated. Phew, I hope I can pass all my examinations smoothly and get a decent job. I shall strike hard and win this last battle and win the war with ACCA, may the forces be with me until the end~

Groom myself =)

Today, I attended the grooming class for OBU but somehow it turned into a presentation workshop instead. I was quite disappointed initially since I was looking forward to those external trainers in teaching us how to dress professionally. However, everything seemed fine as the class went on. The experienced Public Relations Practitioner, Puan Zarina Zainal, spoke fluent English and conducted the class in a relaxing manner.

The workshop started of by an introduction from everyone of us followed by a drawing of our favourite cartoon characters. Then, she stimulated us to think fast by showing us some pictures and wanting us to give our opinion on the picture by relating those pictures with our real life experiences (although I didn't participate in it). After a moment, there was a power failure in the college! I wonder why the tariffs kept increasing yet the service is still so lousy...

Despite the blackout, we continued to carry out our activities in the college's foyer. We were split into groups and played charade. I kinda enjoyed it although my group didn't emerge as the winner. The purpose of the game was to highlight the difficulty of someone to understand our message if we don't speak to them. There might be different interpretations from one's action if the message is not clear to the audience.

After lunch, Pn Zarina went on to talk about first impression. Do you know that it only took 0.5 seconds for someone to create their first impression? Hmm.. I didn't know about it. She instructed everyone to paste a piece of paper behind our back and let us write our impression about our friends. And below is my result:

I also learned the differences between business gaze, social gaze and intimate gaze. In addition, Pn Zarina also taught us different body languages that we can/cannot use during a presentation. She even shared a hilarious video which showed the meaning of different body languages.

I'm quite tired right now, so I'll just skip to the last part.:P Finally, we had a brief presentation to put everything we learnt into practice. I chose to talk about vampire diaries although I ended my presentation quickly as I felt nervous. Surprisingly, I received good feedback from Pn Zarina after my presentation. It certainly made me feel happy for few hours.^^

Double killed

Apparently, I'm currently belonging to the third category. Soon after getting my results for my last semester's exam, I faced the greatest failure in my life. I failed not only one but two papers of my progress test!:( This is the first time in my study life to get such rubbish marks. The worst thing is that I don't even know what the heck was happening. Despite writing as much as I could, I barely got more than half of the marks allocated to each question.

It is quite disheartening since I had started my preparation for the progress test two weeks in advance. In addition, I read my notes twice before the test! Really don't know what more that I can do to get higher marks... It reminded me of something my tax lecturer told us during our CAT class. She told us that being hardworking will not guarantee a pass in ACCA professional papers. During that time, I was not convinced by her words. Who can't pass if he/she put in sufficient efforts to study, I wondered.

Haiz, but I had to admit that my lecturer was right after all. It seems that pure regurgitation of book knowledge does not work at all at professional level papers. Then how am I going to do well in such exam? My lecturer actually mentioned that we only have to bullshit all the way to pass all professional level papers.=.= Worse still, my lecturers want us to think like a consultant. How to think like one when I don't even know what a consultant do?

Many questions running wild in my mind but I don't even know which should I ask my lecturers first... Hopefully everything will be back to normal as soon as possible.

*Studying hard and learning how to bullshit well~*

First mentor meeting

This is a blog post written specifically to facilitate my OBU Degree Skills and Learning Statement (SLS). Hence, kindly ignore this post.=]

Prior to my first mentor meeting, I had done some information gathering on a few companies which I planned to use as the focus of my research during my two weeks semester break. Apart from that, I also spent some time browsing through the Information Pack published by Oxford Brookes University to have a better understanding on the requirements of the research project and the structure of the report. However, I don't really know where to start from despite reading the Information Pack.

Later on, I tried to seek for advice from my senior to assist me in analyzing each topic area and initiating my Research and Analysis project. As that was my first attempt on such research work, I practically stared in front of my laptop for several hours figuring out the contents that I should include in my report. After completing the reasons for choosing my topic area and organisation, I stopped doing my research project for few days as I had no idea what is my overall research approach. Regardless of the efforts I spent on the Internet, I couldn't find an appropriate guideline on drafting an overall research approach. At last, I decided to move on to the next section and left that part of the project blank.

The first meeting with my mentor, Miss Geetha, really helped me a lot. She explained to me the overall structure of my research project and some important points to take note of. Besides that, she also briefed on some presentation skills needed during my fifteen minutes presentation later on. Through the meeting, I get to learn some new things, especially the Harvard referencing system.

I learned that referencing bares an important role in doing a research project. In particular, proper referencing is vital to avoid the risk of plagiarism which might lead to failure of a research work. Referencing does not only limit to the words cited from original researchers' text, but it also intends to acknowledge a researcher's idea. I learned that I have to make reference to a person by merely using his or her idea in my project! In addition, there are many minute details that I have to pay attention to when making a reference such as the punctuation marks.

I also learned how to present my report in a professional manner through the meeting. For instance, I get to know the flow of information needed to be presented in a research report, the font size, alignment as well as the type of line spacing needed. Apart from that, I was being exposed to some business models which I never heard of until then. This allowed me to carry out some research on those business models so that I could apply those models correctly in my research project. I realized that in order to fair well in the research project, I have to apply the business models in the specific business context rather than merely stating the theory of such models.

Furthermore, I learned that any comments made by the company must be verified by relevant sources such as newspaper articles and analysts' reports. The reports of the company may be biased and lack objectivity if viewed in isolation. Hence, more than one source of information is essential so that the results I obtained are neutral and objective.

Last but not least, I finally had a grasp on what to write about for my overall research approach after the meeting. I learned that the overall approach should not be written in past tense and it involves literature review and empirical research. All the insights gained from the first mentor meeting enabled me to continue with my research project confidently with less hiccups occurred during my research work.