Supervisor: Dr May Lim
What is your team’s project about?
Our group is working with caregivers of children with intellectual disabilities in Singapore. We are currently working with MINDS, an organisation that specialises in taking care of people with intellectual disabilties. They have been extremely helpful in connecting us to different caregivers, allowing us to interview them and get a better view into their world. We are currently working on an application that could help these caregivers form a community, be more informed of events conducted by MINDS and get the necessary help. We hope that this application helps them to alleviate the burden of being a caregiver, by letting them know that they are not alone!
What does your team enjoy most about the IEx project?
Our team enjoys making a meaningful impact in the lives of caregivers, especially because they seem to be an overlooked group. We appreciate when we receive good feedback on our application and constructive feedback on what they would like to see in our application.
What are some challenges that you think are unique to the project?
We've faced many challenges throughout this experience! From not hearing back from our organisation, rushing to meet deadlines, balancing school work and app editing, it has honestly been such a hectic run for us >< I don't think we expected a lot of the issues that we faced, like not hearing back from our organisation, having unresponsive group members, or creating a documentary from scratch, but I'm happy with how we handled it to the best of our abilities!
Any specific tips about working with your team’s community?
It's important to be sensitive with whoever we're working with! I think it's easy to go in with a lot of assumptions and questions (which is what we did too!) but it's important to go in with an open mind and not impose our ideas onto them. We need to be respectful of the time they give out of their busy schedules, and respect their honesty in what they are sharing. Most importantly, they may not be willing to open up from the start but it's important to overcome that barrier and continue to work with them respectfully~ It's also important to go in with the mindset that not everything will go your way, so it's important to have back up plans and be flexible at all times! Most importantly, find the fun in pursuing this project, if not it's going to be really hard....
Any fun stories to share with your juniors?
We were interviewing this one caregiver, and she was so excited to be interviewed that we interviewed her for 2 hours! She was really informative and thorough in the information she provided, but we honestly were not expecting to interview her for 2 hours ><