A Sneak Peek into The Real Working World (Part 2)

1.0 Personal Evaluation

To self reflect and self evaluate, I discovered my strong desire to learn along with professional drive. With the passion for marketing industry and its best practices, I seeked for the opportunity to be exposed to wide variety of practical tasks. Mastering good basic understanding of different marketing techniques since my foundation year in UCSI University, I was able to adapt myself with the working environment and catching up pretty fast with the departmental daily development and progress, hence increasing my work performance.

In spite of my excellent verbal and written communication skills, my social skill does have room for improvement. This was clearly seen during the Business Partners’ Meeting whereby I seemed lacking in interacting confidently with Sunway Velocity Mall’s Business Partners. This great opportunity for me to be involved in most of the ongoing events regardless of internal or external function did provide me the exposure towards a higher level of function. The specific communication skill learnt are treasurable. Whereas, my written communication skill was enhanced upon receiving feedback from my colleague on specific words and phrases choices in emails and articles.

This job helped train my marketing and persuasive skills. Besides administrative tasks, I did perform liaison with children’s homes to invite them in CSR initiative, contact outsource creative event coordinating company, connect with third parties for New Year Eve Countdown Party and so forth. Persuasive speech skill was also employed during the proposal towards tenants to recruit them as loyalty programme merchants.

Time management was also another highly important area learnt. Working under various colleagues can be stressful with the workload. Imagine each of them assign me a task and they would eventually added up. This situation pushed me to plan and set priority to tasks according to their urgency.

Also, I expected this internship to sharpen my skill in event planning as I was placed under a mall marketing management. With the interest in event planning, I proposed to try it out. Chances were then offered and as I progressed, issues did arise especially when it came to a big scale event. With my helpful senior colleagues, I was able to proceed with hosting a Facebook contest in conjunction of Christmas celebration.

2.0 Academic Evaluation

There are a number of relevances of my internship with my studies. Just to mention a few, the email etiquettes and business area knowledge acquired in SE207 English for Specific Purposes: Business Communication during the previous short semester were extremely useful and always come in handy. During the first two weeks of my internship, I was tasked to send out reminder emails to all Sunway Velocity Mall (SVM)’s business partners for the meeting, without using the email blast function to show respect. Every details from the CAPS to the addressing titles to the subject line to the content were so crucial as to make sure the outgoing emails were professional and perfect.

Besides, the research knowledge learnt from SE204 Introduction of Language and Linguistics were employed while I was assigned to formulate survey questions to collect on-ground research data. It was necessary to be clear of the survey motive as well as the target audience before designing the questions. The essence of successful survey questions was not about getting a lot of information but practical and helpful ones to enhance the programme hosted by Sunway Velocity Mall. On top of that, we must consider the estimated time to complete a survey should not be too long that occupy the shoppers’ time.

Furthermore, the text proofreading task and content idea creating task required knowledge that I gained from SE114 Expository Writing as well as SE107 Understanding Reading and Writing In English Language. The speech writeups, event promotional articles as well as magazine write ups that I had contributed my part in received great comment from my program leaders. The writing techniques I employed were mostly acquired from SM113 Introduction to Journalism. Creative and eye-catching captions were also created for VeloStudent privileges.

Moreover, the translation knowledge, skill and technique learnt from SE211 Introduction to Translation and Interpretation for Beginner and SE118 Bilingualism assisted myself in translating press release into two languages, namely Mandarin and Malay. The challenges I encountered throughout the process were the cultural analogy that the translated meaning can be differ and the absence of certain terminology in the target language. However, I did not struggle really much as I am fluent in both Mandarin and Malay language.

The aforementioned courses have been the most directly ones that prepared me for this placement due to its job scope nature of writing business emails, creating content, translating and performing market research. The readings and materials provided from these course have allowed me to better adapted myself in the assigned tasks. For instance, the research paper I had done in Translation class was on the Nord’s Theory of Documentary and Instrumental Translation. The theories learnt prepared me to provide proper translation of press release that is coherent and cohesive.

3.0 Practical Evaluation

This co-operative placement helped me in writing better copies of content and translating quality text efficiently. Accuracy of information also played a big role in preventing public confusion and internal misunderstanding.

Though I had worked as a full-time kindergarten assistant teacher, the experience of this co-operative placement provided me a new exposure to a different area of full-time working experience. This experience has undoubtedly given me a sneak peek into the adult working environment as compared to the previous full-time job whereby my audience were children. This co-operative placement also indirectly pushed us into experiencing the real working world which includes long working day and peak hour traffics. This internship period had shaped me into a more detailed-oriented person and a great time manager. I embrace the two other co-operative opportunities which I can learn more of  new discoveries in different industries.