During the woodworking workshop, Kris made it so comfortable to learn, be curious and be amazed to be in the lab. So, I felt a strong sense of belongingness in the world of woodworking. That gave me a great impression of wood that I just wanted to keep coming back and creating amazing things with it, which is why I keep persisted to make my final project – breathing tree by wood.
Give feedback to your peers for their elevator pitches felt like gifting someone: I put more thoughts and concerns in what they would feel when open the box. What works great for me is straightforward ideas to move forward but keep the neutral tone to not add extra feelings affected the views of product itself. I think it is a tricky task that I want to do it carefully but it also gives me so much joy if this can help them just the same way their feedbacks help me.
In academic journey, there have been many assumptions about my ability to succeed as I thought of myself as a “___ person”. Like the flower pot in this class, I thought I was not a design person, my flower pot was assumed not to succeed in terms of visualization. Or in my First Year Seminar, I was always insecure about my English writing as it was not made for a STEM person like me. I was very nervous about my midterm essays and I did not believe I could succeed with it. But my professor met, complicated my outline and confirmed that my writing was not bad.
Not only I had assumption about myself, I also made mistakes of making assumption about someone else. When I was a sophomore, my main concern was my classes and my 2-credits research. I realized a friend in Linear Algebra was so struggling and I assumed they was not a “Math person”. But, it turned out that they were a senior, busy with graduate school application, their Physics and also wanted to graduate 1 year sooner than expected. Everybody had their own stories, concerns and priority, I was so quick to judge somebody just based on a small aspect of their life that I could see and my current experience.
However, sometimes with right intention, we still could hurt or make others feel like they did not belong. When I was in UMass Algorithm class, we had a Friday lab session where we was given 5 problems and discussed with a group to figure those questions out. In the first day, I could barely understand the questions while there was a sophomore in the group quickly understood and offered the answer. Then, when I asked him what that question meant, I felt judgement and even though he helped me, I felt I was so separated and not belonged to the group or even to the class.
It was not the only case that I felt that way. I also did that to the others as well. When I was in my Neuroscience research, it was a Computer Science project for 4 of us: 3 of them were Neuro-CS double major and I was the only one with CS major. So, I had more time than all of them and had more time to work with the coding parts. When we tried to meet and code together for 1hr, it was not efficient as it was the same Jupiter Notebook and usually you could not finish coding anything in 1hr. There were about 2 times that I finished the task by myself, sent them, explained to them and submitted to the professor. Accidentally, I was creating an intense competitive environment where they felt like they were all losing a game. Then, I could not communicate to them anymore and seek help from my PI – Neuroscience professor. He advised me to be honest to them and said he did not mind if we sent things a bit late but wanted us to be together worked as a team. I sent a message to apologize and I needed their help to move forward. Then, we collaborated smoothly and became good friends with each other. I also learned my lesson to notice my teams’ feelings and knew when I should step back to leave room for them to shine. It turned out to move fast, it was not me doing everything fast but it was spreading out the work and let everybody work in their best field.