what is important in communication

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen

Before we discuss our topic today, I want to ask you. How many emails do you send per week, how many phone calls you make per week? Or put this question into more extreme. How many word you say per day?

Why do you do that?

We need to connect with people, with our family, our friend, teammate, co-workers even with someone we don’t like to talk with, our boss.

This is what our life will be work as a engineer. Communication is unavoidable, we receive problem on a paper or email, discuss it with co-workers and other professional personnel, find some solutions, put into practice, report the solution to customer or supervisor, and listen to their feedback.

Clear communication is needed for every step. It seems obvious, but let us read a story from sept.30th 1999. “NASAs metric confusion caused Mars orbiter loss” NASA lost a 125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used English units for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday. They are all top engineers in United States, perhaps the best engineers in the world. 125million dollar lost just because two teams didn’t communicate clearly about the unit in the operation. This kind of story will happen again and again if we just ignore the importance of clear communication.

With the development of internet, our communication speed increases. We can read the breaking new in Washington by just sitting in front of a computer with internet. Clicking the mouse, open a news media’s webpage. We can video chat lively with our family or manufacture manger sitting on Mumbai. It creates opportunity but also challenge to us, because we have too much information. One of our daily jobs is to filter out things we don’t need. On the other hand, knowledge that we want to share with our audience maybe not reach their head. So it is important to make some of our point more significant. Make our supervisor please, when we send him/her an email.

To sum up two points I consider important in communication. First is to send accurate information and check carefully when receives it. Be critical about what we learn. Second is to make the clear, logical ideas when we need to communicate. None of us want to be ignored when we have something important to tell.

Thanks for your time. It is my honor to talk with you.

Connection

Living on a campus with more than 40,000 thousand students and faculty, We some time forgot the importance of connections. Why we need to spend quality time on people we see every day? It's a question often appears on my mind since I came to Illinois. But I ignore that beside name, job, & dry conversations. Everyone has their unique story worth to learn.

It starts from a conversation with my TA complaining my chemical engineering professor. My TA smiles and tell me that a lot of student complaining about him. But it because he is assigns to teach this introduction course, far different from his research concentration. He suggested me talk to him for my concern.

I searched for the syllabus professor gave us on first day, checked on his office hour. Monday 4pm, it’s clashed with my ENG 198 lab schedule. I email him about this and he tells me to come on Wednesday or Thursday 8:30am. On Wednesday I get up at 7:30, washed up and sat in front of my computer. I received an email from him that he has a meeting on 8:30 today, sorry for the inconvenience. For the first time I learned what a busy schedule professor has.

I didn’t turn off my laptop and went to sleep; instead I went to school’s website to check his information. Quiet amazingly I found out he earns his MS from California tech and PhD from MIT. His research is not on boring calculations but on coating that increasing efficiency of drug delivery. Something fascinates me as a pre-med student.

On Thursday I went to his office, chat about his life as a student. He talks about how student’s life different from now and back to his time. It was interesting to learn his life as student, as faculty. I ask for opportunity for undergraduate research, he replies that he needs junior or senior student. Ask him again when I get to third year at school.

After all, I learn that he is not the boring lecturer teaching a useless subject. I were touched by his passion for his research. I would love to take his advance courses and learn more about his subject.