Ping Pong

            In semester 2, I am honored to be selected to join Ping Pong (Table Tennis) as my cocurriculum subject. Ping pong is my most favorite sport, and is the only sport I can play quite well. I am always hope I am still able to play ping pong in university, and this golden chance finally arrived in front of me—this semester is going to be a lot of fun. In this reflection, I will go through what I experienced and what I harvested from this course.

            In the beginning, I felt pressure when I was chosen as one of the group leaders in service learning. I am not too confident in leading the team to complete the tasks. Luckily, we are able to cooperate with each other well. Everything went smoothly with everyone’s effort. I was relieved and appreciated when my group, which in charge in ping pong workshop section in service learning runs the event smoothly.

            It’s fun to see the changes of course mates in class. In the beginning, many of them never played ping pong before, and felt shy to play with other people—most of us just go around within our “safe zone”. This awkward atmosphere starting to change when we learned more on how to play ping pong and went through few activities together. I also met course mates who also are also experienced players. I really enjoy the time when playing and learning from them. Also, I am very grateful to obtain advices of coaches on improving my skills. My skills have improved a lot thanks to them!

            At the end, I have learned a lot of new things and improved both my soft and hard skills. I became more confident when talking with others, and learned more on team-working and leadership. Also, I have learned on how to communicate with kids, and how to teach people on new things. I felt satisfied when I succeed in teaching them on how to play ping pong during service learning in a primary school. Throughout the course, I am glad to see more people have learned about ping pong and starting to enjoying it. Due to this sport is not very popular in Malaysia, not many people around us know how to play ping pong. I sincerely hope this course can help in spreading ping pong to the community, and let more and more people will acknowledge about how exciting this sport can be.

            Ah, almost forgot to mention about my thought about this course. Well, overall, I enjoy this course a lot. Although the table is limited and we have to share the table in order to accommodate all of us, it is still fun to play on after getting used to it – at least it is not as bad as I imagine. I can guarantee that, once you enroll into this course, at the end you might enjoy in playing ping pong as well. Any improvements regarding this course? I think the only improvement will be on something which is less relative on this course – the transportation around UTM. Honestly, it is very difficult for me to travel from my hostel (KTDI) to the sports complex located near cluster area by bus. The process of transferring between bus of different route is nearly impossible, as it is extremely inconvenient and time-consuming. Therefore, usually I will travel to there by walking, same way applied when going back to my hostel. During raining, I have to take a grab car. If lucky, I can car pool with course mate to go back to hostel. It will be better if the bus system improved, allowing students travel from a place to another place with shorter time compare with walking.

Lastly, here is the group photo of my group. Thanks for reading !