Project – Final Thoughts

Through these 7 sessions at PACE@MARS, what I have concluded is that the youths there are neither misbehaving nor rebellious, they may seem to be fierce or cool on the surface, but they are all very nice and cute youths. I believe there must be something that affects them to cause them to be different on the surface, as some of them might have been facing family problems, financial problems or problems with friends. Some of them are actually more mature than we expect, not only through what they say but also the things they do. In the first session when I first talked to one of the girls, I tried asking her about her problems and shared my experience too, but she surprised me with a very mature perspective that I have never thought of. There was also another boy who was going to help his parents with food delivery after his N levels. It suddenly struck me that given the circumstances they are being put in, they did not let those issues hinder them, and it is really very nice to see that.

At PACE@MARS, I saw different youths coming from different backgrounds, facing different problems, having different personalities and ways of interacting. I have learnt to be observant and sensitive to what they say or do so as to understand their problems and way of interaction to speed up the process of engaging them. Different youths interact differently and we cannot apply one activity to all youths. For example, when we are out to play sports, there will be some girls who do not want to join. They would enjoy staying in the room doing something else instead. So, in order to effectively engage them in a conversation, the topic needs to be something that relates to the youth the most. I also believe that giving the youths the authority to lead the conversation is another way of engaging them.

In future, I would want to volunteer more in programmes like this to do what we have done for the past 7 weeks. With the experiences I have gained, I believe I will be able to apply it to the youths I meet in future, and through each and every experience from now on, improve my technical skills of getting into deep conversations with the youths.

One of the changes I would have made is the way I talk to them. As we were thought along the way of how we can instil values in youths, I feel that one of the things I did not do enough is the conversations between the youths and myself. In a lot of the conversations, what I had done was to give them suggestions, possible solutions and questions, but not so much on the values that they could have picked up from these incidents or problems. One example would be during the revision session with the youths. Throughout the 3-4 hours of sitting down together, all we did was revision, math questions, formulas and explanation, but I have never thought of bringing in any values that would be applicable to their lives. Until once when the centre manager told us during the debrief that we could have done some things other ways, such as when we are playing sports and we missed goal, we could have brought in values like “In life, we don’t always get everything we want, but at least we have worked for it, there is no regrets”. Hence, if there is another chance, I would try to bring the values into our activities or even small-talks.