6 months into life at SST, I would like to share my most challenging assignment at SST thus far.
My most challenging assignment at SST (to date): Prejudice and Discrimination
12 June 2019
What was the assignment about?
This assignment was to promote racial harmony in Singapore, as there is still prejudice and discrimination happening in our neighbourhoods. Also, it was to improve our English language through scriptwriting and better understanding the story from our English textbook “Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”. There were so many things to gain from this assignment.
Why was it one of the most challenging assignments to date?
This was supposed to be a group project with Giselle and Zacharias., but I ended up having to do most of the stuff by myself. This was my fault as a group leader not knowing how to delegate. My poor coordination and time-management skills made it worse. In addition, I severely underestimated this task. Initially, I thought I could finish it in a few hours. How tough could it be to insert animation into iMovie and syncing with the audio files?
To my horror, I found out later that the audio files from my friends (sent via Whatsapp) were not compatible with iMovie. I also realised that the deadline was 1700 hours, not 2359 hours as I assumed. At that moment I felt that I was doomed!
How did I overcome it?
Fortunately, my Dad came to my rescue. He started by scolding me for being too complacent. After he cooled down, he reassured me that we can still solve this together. We brainstormed and found a few ways to overcome the problems. We first used google to search which software were able to convert my audio recordings (Ogg files) to a version that iMovie could accept. We found a few software, but all needed to pay money in order to work properly. There is no free lunch after all! Tired and desperate, I asked Dad if I could pay but my father insisted that we push on. After hours of researching, we finally found a solution. That is to use our family Windows PC to do conversion via VLC Player, then pass on the files into my MacBook Pro. I was able to convert all the audio recordings! However, this was just the start to many more challenges to come…
As there were dozens of Whatsapp recordings, we had a hard time trying to keep track of each recording to the correct scene. Luckily, I came up with the idea of naming the audio files according to their respective scenes. Dad then drew on a piece of paper all the scenes - we used it to strike off each recording once it was added. It was much easier now, but once in a while we would still mess up the recordings and needed to redo.
Eventually, all the files were improved and sorted correctly into iMovie. By now it was 1.30am. Way past the deadline of 9 pm. Nonetheless, we continued to press on. What was left now were the animation and exporting as an MP4 file to be uploaded to SST’s Google Classroom.
By the time the task was completed, it was 3.30am. Looking back, I realised that all this unnecessary stress could be avoided if I had better time management and collaboration skills. However, it also taught me that if one has the determination, and good help, no matter how challenging the task, we can overcome it.
Comments