I was born in Singapore and attended Kong Hwa School, Temasek Secondary School and Temasek Junior College (TJC). Since secondary school, I have been instilled with a great sense of responsibility and leadership. I was entrusted with positions such as the Vice President of our Students’ Council (2000-2001), the Head Coordinator of Sports’ Captain (1999-2001), House Captain of Griffin House and the Company Sergeant Major of my CCA, National Cadet Corps. Upon promotion to Temasek Junior College with 8 distinctions, I pioneered a research program, now known as P.R.I.M.E.R. (Portal for Research, innovation, Mentorship, Entrepreneurship and Reaching-out). In the research program, I was given the opportunity to partake in the biannual Singapore Youth Science Festival (2002) and Singapore Science and Engineering Fair (2003) which earned me a gold and bronze award respectively. This period fostered my interest in research work. Furthermore, being the Vice President of TJC Science Council, I helped conceptualise the first Science Park (now known as Kinetic Garden) in TJC.

Carrying on my emerging passion in research, I enrolled in National University of Singapore (NUS) pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Life Sciences. My passion for research was given the opportunity to expand further with my acceptance into the Special Programme in Science. Under this programme, I underwent a rigorous scheme writing review papers and experimental papers covering areas within and outside of my major (within the Faculty of Science). This allowed me to approach Science with an integrated perspective. SPS also allowed my leadership skills to mature with my successful election as the President of SPS (2007-2008). With this, I took on more active roles in the planning of SPS activities and in the design of several experiments in the module SP2170. I also took up mentoring in SPS allowing me to share and vocalise my experiences with the junior batches. I am currently attached to Evolution Laboratory, doing a novel study on quantifying the genetics of a pre-copulatory behaviour observed in Sepsis Punctum under the supervision of A.P. Rudolf Meier.

It is always nice to take a break and look back at how we started out yes? Looking back at the project, everything had been fast paced and efficient, leaving little time to really enjoy the process. However, for my case, after sitting down and putting all my assignment due dates aside, I realise the project have actually been a very enjoyable ride thus far. Even till now, I am still unable to explain our group dynamics of how amidst our busy schedule, we never fail to get our things done on time. This has always been a problem in many of my previous group projects, where teammates fail to cooperate and always having the thought that “other members will do my part for me anyway”.

In the reflection of the group project thus far, I definitely benefited from a positive learning experience. Some of the key factors that drove me to this conclusion include that of efficient planning and effective communication. In the planning system of our group, we adopted flexibility in the delegation of workload. Thus, in the event of upcoming tests, group members will cover up for each other to let the affected member "study in peace". This system may sound as if the job boundary is not clearly stated (due to ambiguous delegation of workload) but it works wonders for us. This is mainly due to team members being self motivated and dedicated to finish the scheduled portion of work. This system also allowed us to work at our own pace and thus working more effectively as compared to working under stress. Effective communication in our group prevented misunderstandings from happening. Most of our group meetings are held in a face-to-face situation where we can readily understand each other through our tone of words and body languages. We hardly like to discuss major issues online, unless they are simple instructions which we used Emails to convey. With these two key learning points, exchange of ideas was enjoyable and the moods of our meetings were always light-hearted.

Thus, I had overall been having a positive experience in handling this project and am able to understand myself better through effectively communicating ideas between project mates. I have also learnt, through understanding myself better, ways to improve several of my weaknesses such as my hesitant nature in decision making or inability to verbalise my chain of thoughts concisely. Lastly, I am very thankful to Lyon and Tiffany for being such wonderful teammates in this project. I do hope that I have been as good a team player in their eyes.