By: Bảo Ngọc (Student of School of Foreign Languages - DA21NNAE)

Based on the cooperation between Tra Vinh University and Fellow Fulbright Program, in February 2022, there was a Soft skills course launched and attracted the participations of over 120 students from TVU School of Foreign Languages. This is a great opportunity for students to enrich their knowledge of several aspects of English Language and acquire professional promotion skills needed for their future development as English Studies students.

As an attendant of the course, I have been engaged in lessons specially designed to focus on enlarging students' knowledge of cultural divergence, miscommunication, and self-understanding. These lessons become so receptive under the instruction of Miss Olivia Anderson. As "practice makes perfect", there are two exercises posted and instructed in every class to help exactly evaluate students' comprehension. Lessons will be flexibly changed if needed to ensure that students can catch up during the course.

Not only does the course provide students with a closer look at interpersonal and communication but also work on improving professional promotion skills as they pertain to an international context, and some of them are time and stress management skills. Nowadays, there are more and more students struggling with time and stress management issues, so do I. In this lesson, Miss Olivia has presented the reasons for these two problems as well as their serious effects. After knowing that, together we discussed some solutions to rebalance our life. The lessons have been so helpful to me personally and I feel thankful to the instructor of this course.

Time and stress management skills are just typical examples among many others. Recently in week 10, we have discussed about email-writing skills in both formal and informal situations. These are important skills that every student should be equipped with before applying to a job position. Thanks to this lesson, I know that for different purposes and to different recipients, we should properly use either formal or informal writing styles to avoid being rude. Furthermore, having a professional e-mail address can show how reliable we are.

Up to now, the course has been over halfway through, and I can see myself significantly grow in it. For the next few weeks, we are going to delve into how to draft an impressive e-portfolio. Truthfully, this soft skills course is beyond my expectation. I am really interested in participating in more International Partnership programs like this in the near future.