Reflection Activity 2

Reflection on Family Day SCSR 2020 Activity

On 6th March 2020, my course department, Network and Security (SCSR) had organized an annual Spring Cleaning/BBQ for all the students including first to fourth years, of the department. The event was done for a whole day from morning until night. It was organised inside UTM. However, this event was organized at different places, N28 for the spring cleaning and preparing food for BBQ during the day and Balai Cerap UTM at night. Since both event was done in the same day, students were asked to split into few groups so that everything can be done in a day. For spring cleaning, students must clean and fix some of the rooms and parts of the faculty’s building. They also need to do some painting and maintaining all the infrastructure that is used by students.

As for me, I joined the food preparation group for the BBQ. The menus for the BBQ are grilled marinated chicken, sausages, spaghetti, mashed potatoes, nasi goreng, cakes, and drinks. I was in the group that was responsible for cooking the Bolognese spaghetti, carbonara spaghetti and mashed potato. There was about 5 to 8 persons in the group to make sure that all the meals can be prepared easily. Even before the day of preparation, I have had a meeting regarding the menus and recipes. In addition, our team also provided some refreshment for spring cleaning team during the day while they are cleaning the faculty.

There are two graduates’ attributes that I got from this event. The first and most important one is the communication skills. After that, another attribute that I got is the Leadership and Team Working skills. As everyone is getting involved with the event, so we were all getting mixed with first to fourth year students. Throughout the preparation time, I need to communicate with both juniors and seniors of my course. So, from this I improved a lot on how to ask someone younger or older than me to do something. For the team working skill, I had the opportunity to enhance it more as I was cooking with other people together, so for example like when I am doing the cooking someone else needed to pass me the ingredients and vice versa.

After since I started my degree life, that was the only time where I could see and gathered with every one of the SCSR family. I was so happy to be able to at least experience it once. Although it was quite exhausting because the event was done in the week of Sukan Sekolah komputeran in which I also took part in being a participant for that event but somehow, I still manage to participate and enjoy both event. I think this kind of program or event is needed occasionally so that it can bring together everyone including the lecturer themselves to avoid us from being distance with each other because it is important to get close with everyone for a better degree life. Besides, students can also release their stress while doing something apart from just studying.

This program somehow reminded me to a BBQ program that I attended during my matriculation study. It was similar in terms of having cooperation between students and also interaction with lecturers. But there were still some differences such as the scale of the program. During that time, it was just for my batch and involving only very few lecturers. So, the workload is not that much besides the dish was not all cooked by us compared to this program which all dishes were cooked from scratch by us. The preparation also did not involve a lot of equipment or setup because the venue was already equipped with lights and so on.

Although my role for the event was just preparing the food, but there is still something that I lack and need to improve. I needed to improve more of my cooking skills and had more knowledge of the recipes. Some of the problems that I need to face is such as for when cooking  mashed potato dressing, it failed at first try. But luckily, at the end we managed to get over it after our lecturer Miss Marina Arshad gave some tips to us. In future, we need to plan it more details to avoid wasting of food. After that, another problem arises when spaghetti carbonara that we cooked tasted not so good. Lastly, there was also food waste since overestimate the amount. From all these problems, I learnt a valuable lesson that I should have ask someone more experience first if not certain of something.

As for the conclusion, I gained a lot of new experience through this simple event and how to handle this type of event better in future. I need to do more research of the recipe so that no food will be wasted. Besides, I learnt how valuable it is to get close with everyone in the department.