Watch out Freshmen

Finally, my recommendations for you guys as well as for the Freshmen starting doing a Blog this year!

I personally think that you should be aware of the following points during your studies in English as well as Blog this year:

1. Learn AWL by heart - I started maybe a little bit too late, but I can recommend learning it, because you will profit from this in all your subjects.

2. Make use of Business Briefs - I used them doing my assignments and I could implement a lot of words in my texts, which I now use more frequently.

3. Make use of online based tools - Our teacher provided us with many helpful webpages, which I always tried to consider doing my assignments.

4. Think in the long run - Always, when I was frustrated by doing assignments I thought of what I want to achieve in my future. Working abroad or even just doing an exchange could motivate yourself. Always keep your goals in mind and I think we all can achieve amazing things. I heartily think there will be a nice placement for all of us in the future.


I might seem a little naive, but I'm thinking that we all can combine fun with work. I personally love traveling and meeting people from all over the globe as I am really open-minded. I am really opened to new things and I took every chance discovering new cultures and mind settings of people.
I was never one of the best in speaking and writing English, I was just a everyday normal guy.

The difference between others and me was the aim of doing something else. Seeing myself being part of a globalized world, overcoming cultural differences and looking for a peaceful world in, which everybody gets a chance doing his or her personal interest in their future jobs.

I want to suggest that you all should go out in the world and discover new things. It will coin all of you even if you would have bad experiences like I had, surviving an earthquake in New Zealand, where over 250 people died. I still took something out of it, friendships with travel mates and local helpers. I could gain so much out of traveling  that I think thats this is the main thing, which I promote.
Starting being impressed after doing my exchange to the United States I came back home as a different person. I gained from funny as well as bad situation language skills and I got more personal value.

Looking into my near future, I would like to combine traveling with doing business in a company in South America or Canada. I think thats what I really want to do. With this goal in mind I will try to achieve reaching this in the next years.

I looked at several other blogs and I could find others, having the same background as I do.

For instance,
Daniel's: http://daniels-super-duper-english-blog.blogspot.com/
and
Cem's: http://www.cem-and-history.blogspot.com/

Especially Daniel's Blog is impressing as he is writing about his experiences traveling to several countries and doing internships there, so doing exactly what I would love to do in my future career.

Ending this, I would like to show you some pictures of me traveling around the world with travel mates.
This might motivate also you also going beyond your own borders.

New Zealand - Surfing

 My Dutch friends having a nice view on Queenstown (NZ)

 People from around the globe having some beer and nice chats

 temporary Indonesian

Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia with my Swedish friends

China Town - Bangkok /Thailand

Nice Landscape / NZ

Uluru - Australia

Go out there and experience your chances in a globalized world!


Here a song, which will always remind me doing my travels!

Assessment Report

I submitted on Monday my last graded Report, which dealt about a construction project.

To:                                                                 John Redforest (CEO of Leatty)                

From:                                                           Lennard Weiss (Representative of Leatty)

Date:                                                            12 December 2011

Subject:                                                     Suggestions for a strategy to rescue                                                                            the Shanghai construction project

Introduction

On 12 December, Joep Breurkens and Pascal Corée (Managers of Shanghai Works), Rick van der Werf and Lennard Weiss (Representatives of Leatty) held a meeting developing a strategy to rescue the Shanghai construction project. We need to develop a new strategy in order to push the construction progress catching up the time that was lost due to delays in previous working sections. We have agreed on the following plan of action to overcome our project problems and to avoid complications in upcoming future projects.

Improving information exchange and co-ordination of tasks

Firstly, we advise establishing an online bulletin board providing all project parties with the opportunity to exchange information and to co-ordinate their tasks.

Furthermore, we propose to show the work process in flow and Gantt charts illustrating the project life cycle in phases and sub-phases. All this will avoid co-ordination problems of tasks, which arose in the past. The responsibility lies with the IT Manager of Leatty.

Creating open team communication channels

Secondly, we have agreed on introducing daily gatherings directed by the construction managers with the whole working team on the building site to achieve better team communication. This will help preventing miscommunication on the spot and create a coordinated workflow. The responsibility lies with the project manager of Shanghai Works.

Achieving a good working morale and motivation

Thirdly, we recommend hiring more construction workers to take the pressure off the whole construction team. Moreover, we advise introducing an intrinsic and extrinsic reward system creating inducements to work goal-oriented to regain the morale and motivation of the construction workers. The responsibility lies with the project coordinator of Shanghai Works.

Suggestions to be considered in future

Finally, backup plans should be prepared for future projects in case subcontractors are not able to perform or deliver their goods or tasks, thus causing delays in our present project. Furthermore, a good communication with the local government would be considerable as we had problems with incoming goods due to road works, which could easily have been prevented.

Conclusion and recommendation

The consulting team realizes that implementing these recommendations will be necessary to regain our time schedule. Moreover we firmly believe that we can regain a good team communication as well as a good working morale and motivation through intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems.

We look forward to your reaction and we hope that these proposals will comply with your requirements.

Lennard Weiß

(Representative of Leatty)

Evaluating now my report with http://conc.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/output.pl?action=#editor

I can illustrate the use of the different kind of words.

This illustrates that I used a lot more AWL Words (16,55%) compared to my last graded Report.

This could be, because I focused a lot on using words from the Business Briefs that are given via NESTOR. 

Graded Presentation - "Erstaunliche Autos"

Hello everybody,

The last weeks we were really busy, as we had to hand in several assignments in all our subjects.
We also had to conduct our graded presentation for English for I.B., which counts for 25% of our total grade.

In the case scenario for the presentation Rick (rick-languagelearning.blogspot.com) and I pretended to be consultants that made recommendations for "Erstaunliche Autos", a German car manufacturer, which had troubles doing their business.
Therefore, we prepared several recommendations helping "EA", surviving their corporate-crisis and becoming competitive again.

To give you guys an idea how our presentation was looking like and what our improvement were, following the slides

As the presentation wasn't our first one we tried to implement all our existing knowledge about: how to prepare an interesting and professional presentation.
Done this, we earned a lot of positive feedback and an sufficient grade (7,7)
Finally, I can say: there is still a lot to improve.
Assessing the feedback of my Lecturer and my class mates I found points of improvement.
Following my main findings:

1. Speaking slower - I need to slow down, so that my audience is not distracted by my fast talk

2. Interrupting my Partner - As we presented I interrupted my colleague several times, which I shouldn't do as it hinders the flow of information and is some kind of impolide

3. Correct pronunciation and spelling -  I made some mistakes that I could have avoided by being more concentrated


Lastly, I can conclude that this presentation showed me that I made another step forward my English improvement. As I  said in my LLH, I want to gain better presentation skills, which I think could gain preparing presentations over and over again. This doesn't mean I am perfect now, this basically mean that I did steps in the right direction.

Feel free to comment my progress!
regards,
Lennard

Happy New Year's Eve!

To keep the tradition year after year!

"Same procedure as every year, James!"