Reflections

March 28, 2021

Reflection on How COVID-19 Affected My Final Year at School (Grade 12)

The last one and a half years of my school education have been nothing but unusual because of COVID-19. At first, the ministry of education cancelled the entirety of the second semester when I was in grade 11, which caused a huge gap in knowledge for me at the time. I did, however, compensate for that by scanning through the curriculum during my free time (which I had a lot of!), so it wasn't that bad for me, but I can't say the same for others.

Then, for my grade 12 (which is the year my future depends on!) the ministry made it so that there is only one semester for the entire year, and what comes in the final exams is a mixture of both semester one and semester two's curriculums! At first glance, this seems awful, but considering the options the ministry had, this seems to be one of the better decisions the ministry could have made. I'd also love to note that the school year started very late (months late) because the ministry needed time to prepare the changes which is perfectly understandable given the circumstances. Also, when school started, it worked on a system of one week face-to-face, and the other week online, and it alternates between the two. This was to reduce the amount of students in the schools per a given day, for social distancing and all. In any case, due to many reasons, the online week could pretty much be considered an "off" week. This meant that we had even less time to finish the curriculum! All of this created a fairly bad situation for all of the students, but those who could manage their time better could actually benefit A LOT from this. The one week off could really be taken advantage off if used property to review and study the subjects.

All in all, despite this whole situation being fairly unfortunate for all of the students, I think a lot of good has come out of it. First of all, I ended up always being left with one week off every other week, where I'm the only one in charge of myself. This pretty much FORCED me to manage my time better. I can't begin to describe how much more self control I ended gaining as a result of these circumstances. Also, due to me having a lot more time at my disposal, I ended up spending this extra time learning other skills, like learning Japanese, programming, drawing as well as some other things. Overall, I considered this to have been a learning experience for me.

March 27, 2021

Reflection on The Winter Workshop Phase of The Takatuf Programme

Around a month ago, I went to the German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech) as part of the Winter Workshop (WW) phase of the Takatuf Programme, which was also the final phase of the programme. We lived there for 9 days and in those 9 days we had to finish multiple assignments as groups and do a series of standardized tests. To be honest, I found the group assignments to be really hard because we were barely given enough time to finish them, which created a very stressful atmosphere for me. And although the schedule was very packed for each day, I really loved how by the end of each day at around 7 PM, we did a bunch of fun activities to ease out the stress. As for the standardized tests, I was fairly proud of how I performed in each of them, but in the SSAT, I feel like I could have prepared much more... I was still proud of my performance nonetheless.

During the WW, I had to improve many of my skills, most notably time-management; due to the extreme time limitations that we had, I was simply forced to manage my time better! But if there is one skill that I'm most happy about having improved during the WW, it's my social skills. Before the WW, I barely had interactions with people outside my comfort zone, yet there I was living with the other participants, eating lunch with them, and doing all sorts of fun activities with them. There was just something really amazing about eating breakfast every morning with your peers and teachers, and then going to class together right after. This was an experience that helped me gain skills I will most definitely use throughout my life, and provided me with fun I will never forget.

October 15, 2020 (Final week and final day of the Takatuf Summer Programme)

Final Reflections on Fourth and Final Week

Today, Mr. Hilal Al Mamari (the Academic head of this programme) briefly explained to us our next steps in the programme, and gave us a brief talk about the ILP (Independent Learning Phase) and the Individual reflection that we'll have to submit before the end of October. The individual reflection was explained to us later in more detail in our CT class. But besides the formal stuff, we also did something very fun today; we played a game called "Goosechase" which involves working together with my team. This was very fun and required us to apply our teamwork skills that we learnt earlier in the program. My team actually ended up winning against all of the other 5 teams which was very exhilarating for me and my team.

October 12, 2020

Today, Ms. Heather (one of our ICT teachers) explained to us in detail how to write a student resume for our ePortfolio. I found this very helpful because I'm going to definitely need to write a resume when applying for a job in the future, and today's lesson is going to make me much more ready for it.

October 11, 2020

Today, my group and I were given time to work on our group report together, and during this time, Mr. Humaid and Dr. Tony (our communication teachers) exposed to us our major flaw in the logic and development of our report. They also explained to us how we can get back on the right track. This was extremely helpful to us because immediately after their feedback, we were able to improve our paper significantly. Also, after this experience, I feel like I have become a much better writer.

October 10, 2020

Today was "Parents Day", which was a very important day for us. We had to present ourselves and our project idea to our parents and Takatuf's faculty members. To be honest, I think that our team did great! With every member contributing equally during the presentation. In the process of preparing for this presentation, I learnt how to present myself properly in a presentation with the proper voice tones, body language, etc.

October 8, 2020 (End of third week of The Takatuf Scholars Summer Programme)

Final Reflections on Third Week

By the end of this week, we got to learn about infographics and all their different types, which would help me and my group create our own infographic for our group project. We also got to learn how to orally present ourselves in the CT (critical thinking) class. We learnt about proper body language, proper voice tones, etc. This is going to help us greatly in the upcoming "Parents Day" presentation.

October 6, 2020

Today, we had a debate with an opposing team. Quite frankly, I was very nervous during the debate because I've never been in one before, however, I feel like I've done great for a first time. This experience was particularly helpful for me because after the feedback given to us by our teachers and the judges, I've understood my flaws and I'm going to try to improve on them.

October 5, 2020
Today's communication class was particularly useful because Dr. Tony (our teacher) explained to us in more detail on how to reference a source APA style, and what to do when I stumble upon something I don't how to reference. I feel like I've finally gotten the hang of APA style by now. However, there's still much to be improved.

October 3, 2020

Today we had a class with Dr. Rachel about the 5 whys which is an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. This was especially helpful for us because it's going to help us find the root problem of the issue we are trying to solve for our group project, which is going to help us find a better solution that would genuinely be effective.

October 1, 2020 (End of second week of The Takatuf Scholars Summer Programme)

General Reflections on Second Week

This week was particularly important for me because in it, I was introduced to my group members. My group members turned out to be very good and our skills seem to perfectly blend. We gave each other roles and started working on our group project together. Throughout my experienced working with a group, I learnt that I need to improve my communication skills, as well as the ability to keep my team involved. I was also forced to learn to give feedback in a more polite way to keep a healthy atmosphere in the team. All in all, this week was a very useful learning experience for me.

September 29, 2020

What I found particularly interesting about the things that I learnt today was our class with Ms. Sally, where she gave us an activity where we were asked to bring a bunch of fruits of the same kind (a bunch of potatoes for example), and see if we were able to differentiate between each one. Most of us were able to succeed in this, which helped us understand that within our group, even if we all seem to have similar skills, we all have something unique about us.

September 28, 2020

I learnt about how to make a proper introduction to my report. I particularly got to understand the importance of a thesis statement, as well as how to construct it. This will help me greatly in my upcoming group project, as we will be writing a report about it.

September 27, 2020

Today I also finished my community plate, which really made me think about my strengths and weaknesses, as well as my skills and interests.

I found this activity particularly useful because it made me remember the things that matter to me, and the exact things that I would like to achieve, which helped me pull myself together.

September 27, 2020

Today, the class was asked to give feedback on the example oral presentations given by our teachers to help us make our own oral presentations better, here's my review on Ms. Andrea's video: "I really loved Ms. Andrea's style of speaking, it seemed very natural and showed a high level of confidence, more importantly, it wasn't boring. Aside from the topic of choice being really interesting and relatable, which was "procrastinating", she also represented them in a very engaging way. That said, I still think there is some down sides to this, one of them being that she was throwing complex words here and there, without explaining some of them, but I suppose that really comes down to time limitation.

September 26, 2020

Today, I got to see the other participants' video projects and learnt a lot from them, but most importantly, today I was introduced to my group where we were tasked with a group project about a general issue and a solution for it, and we were given freedom to how we would present it, together we discussed an idea and started working on it.

September 25, 2020 (End of first week of The Takatuf Scholars Summer Programme)

General Reflection on First Week

The most important thing for me that I learnt this week was critical thinking, I learnt about what it is and how and when to use it, as well as applications on it when you're doing your own research. I consider it to be the most important thing because now that I'm aware of it, it will help me discover and fix many of my flaws.

September 24, 2020

Today, I finished my first Takatuf Scholars Summer Programme project, which was a video about my own community.

I put quite a lot of effort into this video and the part that drained the most time and energy from me was the research part, as Saham (my home town) is not exactly that popular on google, so I had to squeeze what little information there was on the internet.

After I finished with this project, I ended up knowing a lot more about my home town than I did before, as well as realizing how much more there is to know.

Here is a document with all the sources used in this video, sources.

September 22, 2020

I learnt about how to research in a better, more systematic way. I learnt how to tell a reliable source from a non reliable one, as well as tips and techniques that would help me utilize keywords and special symbols, as well as Boolean operators, to more efficiently find my desirable search results. I can see myself using all of that a lot during my academic career.

September 20, 2020

Today was the first day of the Takatuf Scholars Summer Programme and to be honest, I was quite nervous at first, but that slowly went away during our first meeting. I was introduced to Google Suite, and how to use it in a professional environment. The thing that I found to be the most interesting and important for me was Google Drive, as I can now see myself using it a lot!

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