Blog post 3: Reflection on Project Proposal

Our project is on the treatment of migrant construction workers in Singapore. We focus on three groups of people, Chinese, Bangladeshi and Indian. This is because we found that these three groups of people are the majority of the migrant construction workers.

First of all, I would like to talk about the challenges we faced during the whole process. The first challenge we faced was the topics. Through brain storm, we came out with many topics such as obesity among the teenagers, electronic waste in Singapore and so on. After long period of time, we finally decided to do the treatment of migrant workers in Singapore. Although we decided the topic, there are too many things in this topic. So next challenge we faced was to narrow down the scope. As we know, a lot of things can be discussed for the treatment of migrant workers. In the end, through secondary research, we picked up the three major problems, which migrant workers are facing currently and we decided only focus on the construction workers.

The challenge I faced during the entire project was to get the information to support my argument. I was the one to give the proposed solutions for long working hours and low salaries for migrant workers. At first, I wrote all of these without supporting articles and statistics. Later, my teammates told me that I need to find resources to support my arguments. It was a tough time for me. I am not good at research. As a result, I spent a lot time to research online, found relevant information and statistics to support my argument.

Triumphs? I think the biggest triumph was that our team managed to finished our proposal with a high. The team dynamic was really good. I enjoyed working with Tony and Nigel. During the meeting or discussion, we were able to put each other’s ideas and thoughts together to improve our proposals. I learned a lot from them.

By doing this proposal, I have a better understanding of migrant construction workers. They work hard, contribute a lot of efforts in building the city, but some of them are treated badly with long working hours, low salaries and poor living conditions. We should respect them by treating them better, appreciating  their contributions and viewing them equally with no discrimination against them.

Moreover, I also learned how should a proper proposal be. It is not easy to write a good proposal. In order to make the proposal more convincing, many research has to be done to collect useful data and information to prove that the proposal is appropriate. The organization of the content is also important. Writing a high quality proposal is difficult as we really need to consider many aspects before putting the words down.

It is definitely not a perfect proposal, there are a lot of areas can be further improved. One of the things is interview, which we conducted with four migrant workers. The sample size is small, only 4 people, so the data we collected is not so accurate. We should interview more people, giving a more comprehensive statistics to support our stand. Next, the proposal can be done better if we could  interview the construction companies and Ministry of Manpower. This is because our proposed solutions require them to work together with migrant workers. If we could get their point of views about this issues, we might come out with a better solutions to alleviate this problem.

All in all, I felt great to have this opportunity to write such a proposal. It is an interesting and demanding task. As I mentioned earlier, there are still spaces for improvement, with this experience, I believe that I can do a better proposal in the future.