The thirteen week of my internship. This week marks the first week of the ten week LLP program. The program starts off with a two day workshop. We have to present our idea or product to the audience. Me and my partner introduced our prototype and with the slides explained our idea and the initial target market in which we were targeting. We also present to them our initial Business Model Canvas (BMC) filled with our initial hypothesis. The feedback that we got from the crowd totally shot us down, with many people unclear and not sure what our group what doing. they suggested to us to scope down on our application use and target a certain market or industry in the market. The director of CUTE Center, Prof Ellen Do was clearly not happy and she expressed her displeasure during a meeting after our presentation. She also expressed in which way we should improve our product and presentation skills. The good thing about LLP program is they give you the ability to grade your peers presentation online and give them comments. We also received many mixed comments but mostly shooting us down. We thus met up with our mentor, Margaret Ong to discuss what is our way forward and she suggested we focus on the healthcare and rehab industry as she found the hinge design that we were using looks like the blades of the spine and we could use it to track posture as back pain/problem is one of the increasing trends in the market and there would be a huge market for our product. So we pivoted on the first day and we had to change our whole idea. What my supervisor asked us to do was to come out with new presentation slides introducing our idea again and giving background and introduction.
The workshop ended at 6 and my partner and i planned the schedule for the next day. We had to conduct a few initial interviews the next morning and had to come out with a presentation for the afternoon session. We planned a few interviews with friends and colleagues as we only had limited time.The remarks from the first day really encouraged me to do better the next day, i do not want them to look down on a polytechnic student and that i could do better than all of them. Thus i spent the whole night editing the slides.
The second day of the workshop. We did our initial interviews and listed the interview results on the presentation and uploaded it onto the online portal. My partner had MBA classes so i was left all alone to present. I was nervous but i knew that this had no difference from the presentations i did in school and i started. At the end of the presentation, i heaved a sigh of relief as there were smiles around the room. The audience finally understood our comments, and with many positive feedback coming in. Even Prof Do was satisfied with my performance and that really meant something to me as all my hard work finally paid off. Ironically, the comments coming from the crowd was that we were too specific today and they recommended us to scope up again as they were endless possibilities for our product. Some even asked us to go into military and elderly applications.
The rest of the week was spent gathering the interviews required for next week as we had to have 10 interviews per week.I even came to school to get interviews from< Mr Chia, Mr Chee and Mr Roger as i found that they met certain requirements of my target market. I also intrduced my product and the workshop i have been doing now. I find that this is really the spirit of DEB in which you create a product wth your technical skills and at the same time, you also have to sell your idea to the audience. You also have to use interpersonal skills when conducting interviews and most of these skills were learnt from many modules over the years. I finally find that the things i learn is useful and i could apply it to my daily work.
I also spent some time of the week to start doing my poster and the productivity+U report which were going to be due soon.
That sums up the thirteen week of my internship.
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