I'm now in the midst of semester break of my Master program. Enrollment for the 3rd semester will commence in December 2009. Oh, how time flies.
What I've learned so far has been illuminating. But there are a few issues that I know I can do better especially in my assignments and time management.
Studying while working has it's advantages & disadvantages. The advantages are that you are tuned to the real situation and can relate to your studies (what the theories are talking about) and you can have a lot of 'excuses' for not being able to attend class or submit assignments on time. The disadvantages is that you don't have much time to do your assignments and certainly will be late to class. After work, I'm so tired to even read journals to do literature review for my assignments. I like to sleep and I can't stay up anymore as I used to during my degree days (I am getting older aren't I?) Sometimes, I have to do my assignments during working time. But that seldom happens. Only in emergency cases. I do feel bad about it anyway. Feels like my salary will not be 'berkat' for doing it.
Reading academic materials are really, really difficult for me. I tend to lose concentration 5 minutes into reading. More than 5 minutes, what I read won't register in my head. As a result I have to re-read the whole paragraph starting from the point that I lose 'consciousness'. Sadly enough my enthusiasm are not shared by my classmates. Most of them are more into copy and paste when doing assignments. I abhorred that! Why? Because you won't understand what you are doing and what the assignment wants. Plus, I enjoy torturing myself academically. Come to think of it, it's fun actually being able to be so knowledgeable :D At one point I did break down because I didn't know how to do Literature Review until one kind friend forwarded me an article how to do it. Thank you very much.
There was this assignment during my 1st semester which is about Knowledge Creation where the lecturer require us to do literature review, do questionnaire and obtain 30 samples and submit it 1 week after exam. I was really stuck at that point because honestly I don't know how! The assignment were like a mini thesis of you ask me. I mean, I wasn't taught how to formulate questionnaire, how to do the analysis of data, how to do literature review, etc. Talk about culture shock. But somehow I manage to do it after reading about 1 ream thick of articles. And I got A for that.
Time management in managing my studies is where I'm weak at. When I receive my assignment in the first place, I usually collect all the articles & journals first but did not read it until the submission due date is near. Then that's where I usually falls asleep and my mind wander elsewhere when reading the articles. Poor judgment! I need to change my habit for next semester and probably prepare a Gantt Chart to chart my progress in my studies.
Data collection however has been a strong point for me. For every subject studied, I normally have 1 thick file of related articles. I seem to know how to search for information on the web and found lots of journals and e-books. My classmate can't get a grasp how I search for info when I explained to them my method (I can't either & I don't know how I did it) which will end up by me giving them copies of all the articles that I have. I have no qualms about it anyway. We have to help each other because I may be good in data collecting but they are good in information formation in the bigger perspective. After all some of them have work longer than I am. Discussion is a good platform because I like to explain to people what I understand so that I'll understand better. That's what I normally do during exam week.
Now I've finished all my exam for this paper. Next semester there will be no more exams. It'll be more on presentations and assignments which I hear is very, very tough and demanding.
A recap of subjects that I have learned so far for the past 2 semester:
- Facilities Management Framework
- Human Resource Management & Organisational Behaviour
- Information & Communication Technology
- Financial & Value Management
- Strategic & Risk Management
- Facilities Planning & Management of Building Fabric.
To my officemate, congratulations for finally having your ViVa on your Master research thesis. And thank you for submitting my overdue assignment yesterday to UiTM (Thankfully we are from the same faculty). May you obtain your 'Sarjana' soon enough. Love u sis for helping at work and studies.
