My Thinking Profile

The lecturer of 1 of my subjects is quite famous internationally. The locals call him the legend. He originated from Russia, has patents under him, his inventions have been used by Russian industry, consulted by many companies in AU, SG and MA in TRIZ, conducted courses in NIE(SG), invited to many events as keynote speaker and was in articles of several management or business magazines.

During his 1st lecture, he gave a talk about the styles of thinking. He showed us an example of a graph an individual's thinking. After that he said that students who are interested in finding their styles of thinking can email him so that he will send a list of questions and the students' answers be sent back to him. I received my evaluation last week. Here is the graph.



The 5 bars stand for:
(Quote)
The Synthesist: Sees likeness in apparent opposites, interested in change.
The Idealist: Welcomes broad range of views, seeks ideal solutions.
The Pragmatist: Seeks shortest route to payoff: "Whatever works,".
The Analyst: Seeks "one best way," interested in scientific solutions.
The Realist: Relies on facts and expert opinions, interested in concrete results.

This picture came together with a 6 pages file, explaining each style and the way the graph is interpreted. My thinking profile states that I prefer the thinking style of The Analyst more and I disregard the thinking styles of The Syntesist & The Pragmatist.

I could not find any online websites providing this type of evaluation services but I found a book "The Art of Thinking", the authors are the same on the acknowledgement in the file my lecturer sent to me and the title of the Question list is the same as the 1 in the content of the book listed on the website. Guess, I have to buy the book to learn how the evaluation is done. I will visit some bookstores when I returned to SG.
posted by Estan @ 7:33:00 PM (GMT+08:00). 0 comments

Every Project and Assignment over, rest then Prep for Exam

Finished my last project yesterday, sleep less that 30 mins the previous night, doze off would be more appropriate, then went to present the project at 11am. My group members and I were not really prepared for the presentation so it did not go really well. After the presentation we stayed back and continued to work on our codes, oh, I did not mention, it was a software project.

We were in groups of 3; all of us aimed for high distinction in the beginning, that was why we were paired by our lecturer. Sadly, 1 of the guys did not live up to expectation. He did his part at the last minute which was why we were not prepared for the presentation. He was even late for the presentation, worse still was that his codes were all chunked into 1 place and repeated a lot of codes that could be replaced by functions. We are learning to be programmers and both me and the other group members were totally annoyed by this. The fact that he said he wanted to get high distinction in the 1st place made it worse.

We tried to teach him good programming methods but he seems to ignore it or he simply totally does not understand it. We needed to burn our codes into a CD and handed in to our tutor by that day so I took the whole day after the presentation to change all his codes, he left for other work. Repeat => I only sleep less than 30 mins! Me and the other guy wanted to give a really well documented CD as we felt bad for the presentation, not mentioning the fact that we have spent a lot of time on it, so we stayed even longer to run trials for the 'readme' file.

We were the last few left in the lab and the tutor who is a very friendly guy came over and told us he graded us 85/100 for the project. WoW, totally unexpected. He explained that although our presentation was not good, we managed to show all the functions that were required for the project + some additional features. The majority of the class was just fanciful with little functions in their codes or they just knew how to talk. He also said that the co-ordinator might moderate the grades depending on the overall result. :)

I had another presentation on last Thursday, the 1 with the oral examination of 4 questions that weighted 10% each. I scored 8/10 for the presentation and managed to get all 4 questions correct! This mean that I have gotten my 1st high distinction in Uni. Hope I can get high distinctions with those that comes with exams as well.
posted by Estan @ 9:33:00 AM (GMT+08:00). 0 comments

No more TV show to Watch

My favorite Australian Idol finalist, Milly, was voted out. She has been an average performer for the past few weeks, she did not really performed to her potential. Probably because she is just 17, 1 of the youngest in the contest. The judges said the whole of Australia has only seen 60% of her potential, that is how high she is rated. Well, Australian Idol is the only TV show that I watch, besides Sports' news, so now there is no more show on the TV for me to watch!
posted by Estan @ 12:31:00 AM (GMT+08:00). 0 comments

Sleep....

Handed in 2 assignments today and was back at my place around 11++am. I fell asleep until around 5pm, the longest nap that I have ever taken! Simply because I had been sleeping for less than 5 hrs (might be lesser) since the beginning of the week. I felt that I could continue to sleep even longer but dismissed that idea as I did not want to interrupt my sleeping cycle. I will get sick easily if that happens. Anyway, I am left with 3 projects, 2 with reports and my 3 semester project presentation cum oral examination. All due next week, back to work!
posted by Estan @ 7:55:00 PM (GMT+08:00). 1 comments