Transnational Studies

a) Due to the fact that I will be living in an apartment with people of different cultures and religious background, I am able to foresee a few challenges. Firstly, I will be observing vegetarianism for a week. Secondly, I make it a point to set aside 15 minutes every night to meditate. Therefore, I cannot help but hope that my apartment mates will be receptive to my practices.

b) The reason I portray my abstinence from meat for a week as a challenge is because it might affect my performance, and possibly my apartment mates', in various activities. For instance, I will not be able to handle meat. In other words, I will not be able to assist my mates in cooking or preparing our meals for the International Buffet on Wednesday. Hence, I do not know how well this will go down with team morale and productivity as cooking for 16 people is certainly not an easy task. I also depict my need for meditation as a challenge because I require 12-15 minutes of silence in order to attain complete focus. This will mean that the remaining 4 residents of our apartment will have to sacrifice time from their activities in my favour. I therefore hope that they do not view me as a liability and I will try my best to prove an asset to the group.

c) From the challenges discussed above, I believe that I can gain several lessons from this process. For instance, I believe that after these two weeks, I will learn how to adapt well when living with people of different beliefs, which will come in handy during National Service(NS) or when I study abroad. I am also confident about picking up a certain degree of flexibility and also compromising skills, as I cannot have everything my way always and I should think about the interest of my fellow apartment-mates. Furthermore, I will gain awareness about the cultural practices and beliefs of my apartment mates

Entry 2

a) I am definitely a trans-national person. There has never been a moment in the tutorials so far that I have felt out of place or disinterested. I also feel grateful to have been given this two-week long opportunity to develop in this field as this subject is one that has captivated my interests.

b) I feel so because since I was a mere toddler, I have always been inquisitive about my surroundings, the people around me, and why they behave or do certain things differently. The older I grew, the more knowledge I gained, I began to realise that the people around me were heavily influenced by culture. Therefore, I have this thirst to gather information and knowledge of the various cultures not only in Singapore, but also all around the world. For example, I make it a point to go on cultural tours when I visit countries on holidays. When my family and I holidayed in New Zealand a couple of years back, I forced my parents to sign up for a cultural tour package. Through this experience, we got to interact with the native 'Maoris', which helped me immensely in getting to know more about the culture down at New Zealand. Although my parents and siblings started to get restless and bored during the tour, I enjoyed every single second of it, and was extremely satisfied when I came back to Singapore. Simply breathtaking.

c) One vital factor that has helped my trans-cultural skills is that my father is a businessman. He directs a company that is actively and commercially involved in the International Business scene. He has clients from as far as Nigeria, Dubai, Benin and Fiji Islands, as well as partners and associates from countries such as Thailand, China, Morocco and Indonesia. Therefore, I am honoured to have met many interesting individuals from all around the world, with diversified cultures. This has certainly been an advantage to me as I get to interact with them when they visit my Father in Singapore, through dinner or when my Father invites them home. Through this platform, I get to know a lot about their cultures when I interact with them. They generously and willingly share information with me, the languages, practices and their way of life in their country. Another factor which has helped me significantly would be the fact that I have travelled to many countries in various continents for holidays. I am fortunate to say that my passport contains stamps from immigrations officers as far as the United States of America, and also those in the region like Indonesia. As I have already mentioned earlier on in Part B, this has been a platform for me to develop my Trans-Cultural skills.

Entry 3

a) If I had to pick a country to live in