October Plans and Preoccupations

Research

Still writing up my thesis, working on final experiments.
Aiming to submit the first draft by the end of Nov, and the final draft at the end of Dec.

 

 

AWARE

Conducting Sexuality Education workshops for teen girls.

I’ve an interest to develope this programme further with AWARE.

 

• Influencing the influencers 

I’m hoping bring talks/workshops to the teachers. The rationale is that teachers interact with students all the time and greatly influence their thought and behavior, so it’s important that teachers understand the situation as best as they can, to impact students positively with their messages. Currently, sex is not a much talked about issue, so I think formal talks/workshops would actually be beneficial.

 

• Feedback report on teenage sex ed classes

After running these workshops for more than a year, I believe our team is equipped to come up with a report on our experience and its impact. Hopefully this report will be able to provide greater insights for policy planning in future. Hoping to work on this sometime in Dec or early next year.

 

Toastmasters

Am working on my Public Relations and Interpersonal Relationships advanced manuals. I’m hoping to pick up skills here to help with my advocacy work.

 

• Mentoring

Together with 2 others, I’m mentoring a small group of fresh toastmasters through their basic manual. The whole group, mentees and mentors, seem like a lot of fun, very enthusiastic people. We’ve planned monthly meetings within this small group, to present projects, work on speech rehearsals, give evaluations and feedback as a round -table group. We can definately go into details with this size, so hopefully everyone gets to grow a lot. Our next meeting is scheduled for Dec7, somewhere in town.

 

Job Search

I know I’ve said so many times that after my thesis submission, I’m going to take things easy for awhile, write up papers, work on my social life, take a really good holiday and break — it’s something I’ve never done; all my life, my studies and jobs have just overlapped with each other.

But then the other day I was flipping through the Recruits and saw that the Health Promotion Board is hiring a Senior Executive for their youth health outreach, doing public education amongst the youth for stuff like mental health, HIV prevention, anti-smoking etc. Stuff I believe in, in another words. So I applied for it!  One thing though, they’re looking for a mass comm grad, which I’m not at all. I’ve no idea if they will even call me up for an interview, since it was an online form I had to fill, and there was no opportunity to write a cover letter explaining how I’m not both overqualified and underqualified. We’ll see.

AWARE too is looking for people for it’s support office. I’m contemplating. It would be a dream opportunity to get to know the workings of an NGO from the inside, and I think AWARE is one of the most active and effective NGOs in Singapore. Also, it’s really nearby my lab, meaning I can actually work there office hours (all this has to be post-thesis-submission), and then go to the lab in the evenings to work of my paper and all the loose ends for my experiments. And after my defense, and really completing my PhD, which probably would take another whole year, I would have gained experience in an NGO, which would be both valuable if I decide to stay on, or apply for an international organisation.

Then again, working in a post-doc lab, experiencing life overseas, that would be so enriching and tempting too. I’m watching out for research opportunities in either the public health/epidemiology or evolutionary biology fields.