-- by Yvette Hiew, PCS Year 2 student

I went to Health Promotion Board (HPB) Community Youth Health Conference 2010: Towards Healthier Youth, on 10 March 2010, Wednesday, with only one intention in mind – to share about the research project that my group conducted, just like how we did during the Research Symposium held in NP in January 2010.  We were honoured to be one of 3 student groups from the Diploma in Psychology & Community Services (PCS) who were invited by HPB to do poster presentations at the conference.  NP was also the only educational institution who was invited to present. 

I am proud to say that I gained a lot from this exposure and experience. What I did not expect was that the participants who were youth workers, social workers and counsellors in community organisations were genuinely interested in finding out more about our project. To me, we were just Year 1 polytechnic students doing a research project on youths’ binge drinking attitudes and behaviour and I thought the project would likely be seen as insignificant and small scale to these organisations.  Yet, I was proven wrong when we saw many people coming up, reading the poster intently and asking interesting questions.    

Many also gave their opinions and raised some issues and suggestions that provided interesting food-for-thought and could help us further improve our research project. For example, some thought that organising anti-alcoholic events may not be effective in reaching out to majority of the youths in Singapore. It was enlightening and informative to learn from others on areas that we had not thought about. 

I’ve gained a lot of perspective and exposure through this conference, such as learning to adopt different approaches towards our projects and research and not tohave a one-tracked mind. We also learnt to not limit ourselves in our work but to dare to dream far and big. I believe the same goes for the rest of my group mates. This conference was an opportunity that not all our course mates would have.  Thus, we are grateful to HPB and NP and are happy to have benefited from it.

3 research posters on Binge Drinking, Female Smokers and Pre-NS Enlistees Help-Seeking Behaviour.

My groupmates and I presenting the research findings on youths' binge drinking attitudes and behaviour in Singapore.