Frankly My Dear: How to eat humble pie

GRAPHIC: LIM PEI YI

By Constance Yeo, Lifestyle Editor

When I entered NTU as a bright-eyed freshman in 2012, I knew I had a lot of challenges ahead of me.

As I desperately tried to juggle part-time work with my studies, the importance of finding good group members for school projects became clear to me.

Coming from a junior college where work was mostly independent and teachers were always there to lend a helping hand, I wasn’t attuned to the challenges that group projects posed.

University was an entirely different ball game and I learnt this the hard way in my first two years in the school.

All too often, I took offense at my group mates’ criticism towards me during group projects and misconstrued it as personal attacks.

For a compulsory film module I took in my first year, I worked with a good friend who was easygoing and spontaneous.

While this made her a fun and exciting person to hang out with, these same qualities made her a terrible group mate.

She consistently turned in shoddy work, missed deadlines and skipped group meetings.

But instead of highlighting my unhappiness with her work ethic, I immediately cut her off as a friend.

In my second year, I grouped with another friend for a marketing project and it also turned out to be a disaster.

Our working styles clashed as I preferred to complete my work at least half a day before the deadline while she liked to fine-tune details till the very last minute.

To her, I was too rigid and my failure to empathise with her point of view resulted in a lot of tensions which unfortunately spilled over to our personal friendship. Once again, I lost yet another friend.

On hindsight, I realised it takes two hands to clap.

In both cases, we were too immature to put down our pride and sort out our professional differences.

Instead, we unanimously chose to sacrifice our friendships.

It took a six-month internship programme for me to finally learn to eat humble pie and accept constructive criticism without taking it to heart.

At the start of my writing stint at a luxury lifestyle magazine last year, I was tasked with interviewing one of the most prominent investors in the world.

I made the rookie mistake of sending my very important newsmaker a long list of questions for an email interview.

What I should have done was request a short phone interview instead of burdening my time-strapped interviewee with a list of endless questions.

When my editor realised the mistake I had made, she gave me a lengthy tongue-lashing and berated me in full view of my colleagues for being sloppy and careless.

The experience was brutal and I felt she was unjustly harsh.

But by the end of my internship, I found that I was able to improve my writing tremendously once I put aside my pride and worked relentlessly on the flaws my editor pointed out.

While compliments are easy to receive and honest feedback, a bitter pill to swallow, I was ultimately grateful that she had bothered to correct all my mistakes, which helped to improve my work ethic.

It was only then that I realised the importance of constructive criticism on one’s work. My personal sentiments towards someone should not interfere with our working relationship and vice versa.

When it came to my final-year project, my group had differing views but we never once quarrelled. Although we were not the closest of friends, we respected one another enough to understand that criticism from our group mates was not personal.

Instead, we took time out to listen to opposing viewpoints and this helped move our project forward.

I may have disagreed with my group mates over certain details but after four years in university, I was finally mature enough to make sure none of our disagreements affected our friendships.

While some final-year project groups had shouting matches and others subtly complained about their group mates on social media, my group celebrated the end of our 9-month-long project with a hearty Japanese buffet lunch.

The precarious balance between personal relationships and work is a tough skill to learn, but the pay-off is immense.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as maintaining a friendship while producing quality work.

But more importantly, although it may be tough to swallow humble pie and admit I am not the special snowflake I think I am, it is imperative that I keep an open mind regarding my shortcomings and accept constructive criticism to improve myself.

And that, in retrospect, is my greatest takeaway from my four years in Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.