15 July 2016 Group 2

7/15/2016

Group 2

Alicia Au

Ingrid Luk

Doris Wong

Natalie Yeung

Sharon Lau

Today began with longing for this program to never end! We attended our very last lesson at Stanford on ‘Effective Non-verbal Communication’. This was a practical and very useful lesson which would help us not just in our school presentations but also in our later lives. Our teacher told us all about the little details of what we should do with our physical actions, movements and voices while giving a speech. We now know where should our hands be, where we should look, how to make good use of our pitch, volume, and speed of delivery. We even learned how to shake one's hand properly in order to leave a good first impression. Towards the end, Natalie and Doris both volunteered to present a one-minute speech in front of the class. Natalie talked about how she learned Swahili, while Doris talked about how she got into ostrich breeding. Although everyone in the audience knows perfectly well that none of this was true, we still enjoyed their speeches and it was a lot of fun listening to their bizarre stories.

Save the best for last – well, that was what it was in the afternoon when we had to make our final presentations. The source of our inspiration for this presentation was our Decision Making class.  Our group presented a scenario in which a character is kidnapped. To arrive at a decision of what the kidnappee should do, we made use of a decision quality chain that we had learnt in class earlier.  We explained how to have a helpful frame, clear values, creative alternatives, useful information, sound reasoning and commitment of taking action. This helped in presenting the possible choices and allowing our classmates to come up with other creative alternatives.  With the help with the decision making chain, we evaluated the decisions that were given and tried to choose the best option. With four possibilities provided – call for help, free yourself and run away, attack your kidnapper and last but not least, our classmate’s creative idea, just sit and wait for help. The five of us definitely enjoyed our classmate’s presentation, one of the groups even made up a case to re-create the mock trial elements, to really show that they’ve learnt so much from the Stanford summer program. Ending the session with presentation of certification, we could not help ourselves feeling sad, thinking that we would be leaving this beautiful campus soon. Our group surely hoped that we had more time to spend in this amazing campus.

The most exhilarating part of the trip came in the evening. We had a massive water balloon fight! It was incredibly exciting to hit water balloons at each other and even our beloved teachers were not spared! We all had the time of our lives. Since California is facing a drought right now, we decided to stop the fight after 3 rounds and we all went fountain hopping instead. In high spirits, we rushed down to The Claw and all hopped in without a second thought. We brought bottles and cups to scoop water and splashed at each other. We were all wet and a bit cold by the end, but we still had an amazing time. We would like to thank the counselors for organizing this and we all had great memories to keep for a lifetime thanks to their effort. Last but not least, don’t forget to protect the environment!