Letter of advice

Hello everyone,

I have had so many experiences at the university so far. During the last few months, I shared my progress in English on my blog and I really hope that all of you enjoyed reading my blog. Now it is time to write a letter of advice to next year’s students about my experiences so far, and I want to give you some advice to make certain things better as I did. I will also give you some advice about how you can prepare yourself a bit when you are going to study IB&M next year.

Before I came to university I was a little scared that my English would not be good enough because at university it is not anymore common English, but a lot of professional specific economic language. Therefore, I was a little bit insecure about my English level at that moment. One of the reasons why I chose for the study IB&M, is because I wanted to improve my English. I wanted to speak more fluently English and I wanted to enlarge my vocabulary and especially my academic vocabulary. I experiences that my English has improved a lot since I am studying at university. During the first tutorials for example I was scared that what I wanted to say was not formulated well, and so I chose to be silent. But other people said things that were either formulated perfect, and everyone understood what they were saying. Therefore, I decided to speak out loud too, even though it was not always perfect English. From that point, I really improved my English and because of all the practicing, my English is now on a higher level than beforehand. So, an advice I want to give to next year’s students is that you should dare to speak up from the beginning, and then you will see that your English improves every day. And then you also get used to the English language and then your study will be more easy for you.

Furthermore, you can prepare yourself by watching English movies without subtitles. With doing that, you can enlarge your vocabulary. And although there is not a lot of academic vocabulary in those movies, you will see that your vocabulary enlarges, and you can make good use of that next year! Another good thing to do before you go to university is to read a lot of English books, because that will help you to read your study books faster. You have to read one book every eight weeks for every course at university. This is a lot, don’t underestimate this! You can prepare for this by reading a lot of English books beforehand.

To conclude with, I want to say: Don’t hesitate just do it! Good luck to you all with the next year!

Regards, Floor

Leatty

Hello everyone!

Last week we had to write an assessment report to the board of directors of Leatty.  Leatty, a major property developer, has already been involved in several projects in China. The company's latest project is in Shanghai. The project is over budget and behind schedule and they faced several other problems. Before the Christmas break, Bernd Heimann and I (project sponsors of the senior management), had a meeting with the project managers to discuss these problems, and devise a new strategy for Leatty. Below you can read my assessment report to see what we discussed.

                                                                 ASSESSMENT REPORT

To:                                           Board of directors of Leatty         

From:                                     Floor Vasse (Project sponsor of the senior management)

Date:                                       5 July 2011

Subject:                                 Assessment report: Devise a strategy to rescue the project

Introduction

On 30 June, the project manager and project sponsor hold a meeting. They discussed the problems

and devised a new strategy to rescue the project in Shanghai. The project is 16 per cent over budget

and two months behind schedule. We urgently need to rescue the troubled project.  We have agreed on

the following plan of action for a new strategy to rescue the project.

Internet-based application

To begin with, we want everyone to use our Internet-based application. This is important, because

then  everyone can collaborate and manage their projects more efficiently. The problem is that some

people are not familiar with this software. Therefore, we want to provide them with a training, where

they will get instructions about how to use this software. With this we want to involve every employee

in this application.

Common goal, communication, working practices

Secondly, we suggest another meeting time, namely, 7 o’clock in Toronto, 13 o’clock in Berlin and 19 o’clock in Shanghai. We think that this meeting time, is better for everyone. With this, we want to improve the communication. Furthermore, we propose to have one get together a year, because it is important to have face-to-face communication. This makes it easier to exchange information and solve problems. Due to poor communication, there is no real sense of working towards a common goal. Therefore, we want to introduce a bonus system. If the company reaches the deadline, they will get a reward for that. We want to improve working practices by having more engineers to reduce the work.

Neutral coordinator

Finally, we want to create a safe atmosphere in the project by introducing a neutral coordinator, so that team members will talk openly about problems and risks. We suggest to introduce one coordinator per country, and they have to report to each other and work together.

Conclusion and recommendations

All in all, we need to improve our communication and we need to clearly set goals for everyone. There has to be a common goal, so that everyone gets involved in the project. By face-to-face communication and another meeting time, we can improve communication. We firmly believe that these improvements are core in the new strategy to rescue the project.

We look forward to your reaction.

Floor Vasse

Project sponsor of the senior management

This was my assessment report, enjoy the rest of your day!

Regards, Floor

Do you speak English?

I found a funny video about speaking English on the internet, which I want to share with you. The reason why I want to share this video with you, is because my blog is about improving my English, and this is a funny video about speaking English. Enjoy!

Happy new year!

Hello everybody,
First of all, I wish you all a very happy new year! I know that I am a little late with that, but I have had a really busy, but nice vacation! I spent christmas with my family, I really enjoyed it. I spent new years eve with my friends, which was a really cool party. Tomorrow I am going back to reality, because then the vacation is over, and I am going to university for the first day this year. In about a week, we have to present our Language Learning Blog, I hope that it will go well, because I have spent a lot of time to this blog. Furthermore, I want to provide you with the link of a blog of a friend of mine, who has also a Language Learning Blog: http://merylslearningjourney.wordpress.com/ Maybe it is a nice idea to compare our blogs to see differences or similarities.
Finally, I want to share a video with you, which I found on the internet yesterday and I think it is an awesome video. It is a cover of the song "Somebody that I used to know". I hope you enjoy this video.

Regards, Floor