ASHRAF (KIA160702)

Assalamualaikum and greetings to everyone. Today I will be sharing my final reflection on this project. I will start by sharing why I believe social engagement is important. Then I will elaborate on the important impacts of this project on me and what are the important things that I learned through this experience.

Social Engagement is a very critical course that has a significant importance towards us students. Nowadays technology is increasingly being used in our daily life. Hence, as the technology develops more, people tends to lose face to face communication. People stopped to have eye contacts with each other. According to Huffpost.com some mothers stated that they have lost eye to eye communication with their children due to increase use of tablets, computers and phones. Because of this, the youth are struggling when it comes to interacting with the real world and prefer virtual communication. 

Our social engagement course is meant to break this barrier between the students and the community and help to prepare us to give back to the community and be active members within the community. Through this course, I can say that the objectives have been achieved and I learned a lot of things about my personality and my possible contributions. Therefore, I’m writing this essay to give my personal reflection on the activities that we carried out during our engagement with the community and the impact of those activities on me as a student. Unlike many other courses in the university, in my opinion social engagement is a course that is all about interacting the community and developing the personality of the students to become ready to join the community. This course was a powerful tool that helped me to sharpen my inter-personal skills more. I think the most important impacts from this experience was on my communication skills, public speaking and critical thinking.

I learned many things from this course in many areas. However, in this reflection I will focus on two major areas that I felt that I had enhanced during this course:

i)                   Personal and Professional Development

ii)                 Social impact

i) Personal and Professional Development

I gained a lot of experience throughout this course. Factors like the Interactions with the kids and the people in charge of the NGO like Datin PH Wong, Mr. Tan and Mr.Hor has took me through a new experience. Interacting with the kids has helped me understand them in terms of what they want to do in their future and the challenges they are facing. The kids also shared with me some of their dreams and what they want to do in their future. It was a unique experience as it made me go out of my small shell and listen to others. I tried to understand the children in terms of what they have been through and what they are facing. This has increased my sense of responsibility and has given me the motivation to feeling the need to give back to the community and help other people.

 

For some time, I was confused about my future and what path I want to follow but in some way this experience has helped me decide the path that I want to follow in my life. It might have been only a few days interacting with the people at toy libraries Malaysia. But throughout this duration, I discovered many things about my personality, my strengths and my weaknesses and hence helped me have another thoughts about many steps that I want to take as an engineering student.

Our project was carried out in a low-cost residential area in Damansara called Apartment Idaman. During our project, I observed the design of the residential area and how it was constructed. I observed the surroundings and the playground (where the Toy Library is located) allocated for the kids. Because of those observations, I concluded that as a future civil engineer, my degree of professionalism in my job can affect a lot of lives. In other words, that residential area doesn’t have a proper playground for all the kids to play and enjoy their time. Furthermore, the location of the playground wasn’t safely accessible for the children coming from the far blocks. Some blocks were very far from that playground which makes it very dangerous for those kids to cross the road and reach the playground leaving them under the risk of a sudden car accident. Therefore, as a civil engineer, I need to consider all the people living in those areas and create proper designs that can make peoples life easier, safer and healthier. From this I can say, that this is a strength and a power that I discovered within myself during this course. Beside that I feel that this feeling has given me more motivation to study even harder and succeed to become a great civil engineer. Beside discovering my strengths, I also found out about some of my weaknesses. My weakness through this course was the Malay language. As an international student I took the Malay language course in my first semester and I also frequently try to speak in Malay with my fellow classmates and I was thinking that my level is already enough for me to communicate with other people out of the university. I was interacting with the children in basic Malay, but It was hard to understand everything so sometimes I end up using google translate for some words or ask my group mates to help me translate. Hence, I discovered that my level in Malay language is still weak and that I need to improve it more. However, it was a great time full of joy, knowledge and experiences.

(ii) Social impact

Previously I knew that a civil engineer can have a huge impact through building the infrastructure of the country, but I didn’t know that even small details like the accessibility of a certain playground can have such huge importance to many people. I didn’t know that even a small playground can change the life of many children and hence change their future. Therefore, I came to understand a civil engineer can contribute towards people lives and how even very small details can hold enormous impact on a lot of lives. Hence, Civil engineers can have a big contribution to the community through creating safer and healthier world.

To sum up, during our project activities we carried out contained lots of planning, practicing and preparations. We interacted with different people from different backgrounds and also kids from different ages. During our interaction with the children, one of the activities included planning together with the kids to find possible ways for them to create income. From this I learned that no matter what I am doing and no matter how small or big my activity is, I will always need to plan first. Because planning is the most important factor in achieving success. Later during the day of the carnival, we taught the kids some of the skills that they can learn and practice to earn some money like making the butter-fly key chain. we also taught them other skills like how to make a sandwich. Those skills were very important for those kids as this helps them to start depending on themselves on a small scale. Therefore, this has helped me understand the importance of all small details that builds up success. Besides that, I also learned the importance volunteering in such community events.

At the end I would like to show my sincere gratitude to all my team members who showed a lot of commitment during the entire time of this project. I also would like to thank our supervisor Dr. Majid Mirzaei who guided us through this project to ensure its successful completion. Finally, I would like to end my reflection with a quote that I truly experienced during this project 

“You only know yourself when you go beyond your limits.” - Paulo Coelho.