Application Letter Critique

20 Telok Blangah Drive

#01-32

S090020

Tel: 8123 8123

12^th Feb 2012

Mr Seow Kah Ping

Director

45 Maxwell Road
The URA Centre
Singapore 069118

Dear Mr Seow,

I am Yeo Xi Min and I am writing to apply for the position of Urban Planner (Urban Planning Excellence) as advertised on URA careers website on 31 Jan 2012. I have just graduated with a degree in Geography and would like to offer my strong theoretical understanding of urban and environmental issues to your organisation to transform Singapore into the most liveable city in Asia. Your organisation’s mission of making Singapore a great place to live, works and play deeply resonates with me.

I am highly qualified for this position since I possess both the hard and soft skills required for it. Firstly, my knowledge of urban and environmental issues extends beyond those acquired from a formal education to first-hand encounters with such issues on the ground through my visits and investigations of areas in Cambodia and Singapore respectively.  These experiences have allowed me to reflect on the possible areas of improvement in current urban planning practices. My training in the social sciences has also honed my critical thinking skills and has made applying them intuitive in everyday life. Besides, I also have an excellent command of written and spoken Chinese.  

At the same time, I have developed an impressive set of soft skills through the projects I have undertaken throughout the years. They include community development and voluntarism projects to an orphanage in Cambodia and environmental activism projects that promote tree planting on the school campus. Such projects required a high level of dedication to see through and also demanded for me to be a highly adaptable individual. Reason being that I needed to switch readily from being a team player when doing collective tasks to an independent worker when it came to making decisions as the leader for certain aspects of the projects. I am confident that I will bring the same level of commitment, intensity and meticulousness to the position if I am being offered it.

  

I have enclosed my resume for your perusal. I look forward to meet you to learn about the expectations for the position. Feel free to contact me if you have any enquires. Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Yeo Xi Min

Was the interpersonal conflict resolved?

I was working on formulating a mentorship programme for an environmental fund. Its purpose is to help mentees better articulate and achieve the goals of their projects. My task was to create a list of the roles and responsibilities of mentors. 

When the committee met up to discuss the list, Tom* commented that the statements were too vague and that he could not understand the true responsibilities of mentors from those statements. Instead of sentences like mentors are expected “to offer guidance, assistance and resources required by mentees as far as possible”, he preferred statements that specified the exact responsibilities of mentors.  For example, mentors are to handle/guide the analysis/development of ideas and proposal writing. I disagreed with him as I felt that the needs of each mentoring relationship would vary and hence being too specific about the responsibilities of mentors may prove to be inefficient and irrelevant. I wanted to only provide guidelines to maintaining a good mentoring relationship. 

Moreover, we had different expectations of mentors. Tom felt that mentors had to know everything, but I felt otherwise. I felt that mentors themselves are also on a journey of learning and self-development and thus must be willing to learn from their mentees. Tom’s high expectations for mentors may be because he already has excellent ability to solve his own problems and is only looking for someone who can tackle or provide opinions on his toughest problems. 

Eventually, his suggestion for a more specific list of the roles and responsibilities of mentors was adopted by the committee. Not too sure if the interpersonal conflict was resolved since it was a decision made by the committee... So, how would you resolve the interpersonal conflict between the two people so that their working relationship remains amicable?