Meeting Online Friends in Real Life!

My Singapore trip was really Awesome, Alhamdullilah! This was my first trip to SG, I went there to attend World Confederation of Physical Therapy Congress. I started my trip two days before the congress just to explore the SG. I planned everything before few days to depart (I like planned trip but always happy to have an adventure part by fate). I was pretty sure that all of the upcoming events and meet up with friends and cousins would be amazing (God Will) but there’s one of the most interesting thing of my trip , it was I had plan to meet my online friends in person very first time after facebooking, knocking, chatting and Instagramming each other for a long time. I don’t have any interest to bang everyone I met online, not at all. I am so conscious and even irritate for having new friends. I was so excited to meet these two new friends, one has been living and working in SG for a couple of years but another one is unexpectedly and surprisingly came SG from Malaysia for her own reason but it seem to me like she came only to meet me. These are interesting and exciting part of my trip.

One funny part is that maybe you have heard “Safety tips for meeting online friends for first time” and “Dangers of meeting online friends in real life” (jokes) .Really I didn’t plan to bring many friends and I didn’t have the escape route but I did some research about them. I did research before I had no idea about one day I’ll meet them because I already had some interest on them, they just amazing creatures, caring and top of them is they are lovely funny girls. So, it turned just amazing when I knew that I am going to meet them. It’s not just finished by having excitement before we meet but rather more interesting when I met them. I am a kind of moderate introvert personality and too much worried about not to happen awkward moment when I meet new friends. But it doesn’t mean I don’t love spending time with friends and interacting with familiar people in social situations. Thanks God, that girls saved me, it was like when I see them they did really set me off to overcome something kind of shyness. They are such a gorgeous, outgoing and cute. My very first question to them was “Is it the same as you expected or any difference Online me and Real me?” Both responded “YES” and not that different. That’s pretty cool to know how I am presenting online and how people expect me in real life, because nowadays my online level of presence is getting dominated than real life level of presence as I am struggling to survive in the extremely busy life. Another thing I’ve learned was asking awkward questions in the first few minutes, some people suggested that when you meet online people outside, don’t try to figure out how you know each other. Yes, it will be really creepy question if you ask them. Not everyone have the same intention who to make friend, so better leave that part and enjoy the moments. I hung out a lot and had fun with them during my stay in SG, which I really didn’t expect! So it’s worth to meet online friend in real life but I would say who to meet is your choice!



“Met By Chance Become Friends By Choice”
It’s been a while I back from the trip but I couldn’t manage and squeeze my time to blog about that. When I was on board on the way back home, I made reflection for what I got, what I achieved and what I have learnt from the trip, I noticed that both of you were played a big role of my trip. Hope to see you again in the future (InShaAllah).

My First WCPT (World Confederation of Physical Therapy) Congress experience #WCPT2015

Allhamdullilah! WCPT congress (May 1-4,2015) Singapore nicely over by leaving a lot of memories, experiences and lessons :)
Being a part of WCPT is tremendous and amazing experience for me. This is my very first experience of attending the physical therapy’s biggest international event. It was a perfect time to make new friends and have professional networking opportunities.
Start from the colorful opening ceremony to the closing of the congress, I met a lot of people from different background, different cultures and with the different perspectives across the world but we share the common thing which is we all are Physical Therapist. It was my dream to attend WCPT congress since I started my PhD journey even I haven’t had anything to present at the congress. I wanted to see how experts present their work, how people make networking for their own interest and how different working groups and committees work so hard to run the congress smoothly. Even I had some challenges and barriers to be a part of WCPT, I’m glad that I enjoyed the congress so much in both role of a volunteer and a delegate. Being a PT of non-member country of WCPT, joining the WCPT by self-funding and speaking English as the 2nd language are some of the challenges and travelling during PhD Qualifying Exam is huge risk for a PhD student.

However I enjoyed, I learned and I expended my horizon by joining some discussion, interacting with peoples with common interest, getting to know with experts in my interested field and participating in the networking session of early career researchers and professionals.

At the End, WCPT congress left me with motivations, inspirations and energy to try to join next congress in 2017. So, let me say "See you in Cape Town, South Arfrica" InShaAllah!!!

WCPT Congress 2015ကို volunteer အျဖစ္ပါ၀င္ကူညီျပီး တက္ေရာက္ဆင္ႏႊဲမယ္႕ မျဖဴႏွင္းလိႈင္ ႏွင္႕အင္တာဗ်ဴး ( Myanmar Physiotherapy Student Society)

ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ ၂၀၁၅ ခုနွစ္ ေမလ ၁ ရက္ကေန၄ ရက္ေန႕ထိ Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre မွာ က်င္းပမဲ႕WCPT (World Confederation of Physical Therapy) 2015 ကို တက္ေရာက္ဖို႕အေစာၾကီးကတည္းကဆံုးျဖတ္ခဲ႕တာပါ။
ဒီ ကြန္ဂရက္ဟာ ျဗိတိန္နိုင္ငံ လန္ဒန္ျမိဳ႕မွာ၁၉၆၃ ခုႏွစ္ကတည္းက ၄ ႏွစ္တစ္ၾကိမ္က်င္းပခဲ႕တာပါ။ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္မွာ နယ္သာလန္ နိုင္ငံ အမ္စတာဒမ္ျမိဳ႕မွာက်င္းပခဲ႔ပါတယ္။အခုစင္ကာပူအလွည္႕ေရာက္လာပါပီ။ ဒီမွာ symposium ၂၅ ခု၊ networking sessions ၃၃ ခုနဲ႕Discussion panels and Debates ၁၁ ခု, seminars ၁၅ ခုေက်ာ္နဲ႕ ၃ ရက္အတြင္းမွာ တင္ျပဖို႕ျပင္ဆင္ခဲ႕တဲ႕abstract ေပါင္း ၂၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ ရဲ႕ presentation ေတြ, physiotherapy research,education, practice နဲ႕ service delivery showcase ေတြပါပါမယ္။
ဒီလိုမ်ိဳးပြဲၾကီးေတြမွာ ပါ၀င္ဖို႕ဆိုတာကို ကၽြန္မလြန္ခဲ႕တဲ႕ႏွစ္ႏွစ္ေလာက္ကတည္းကရင္း အိမ္မက္မက္ခဲ႔တာပါ။
ပါရဂူေက်ာင္းသူတစ္ေယာက္အေနနဲ႕ ပညာရွင္အခ်င္းခ်င္းခ်ိတ္ဆက္ျခင္း၊သင္ယူျခင္းနဲ႕ အေတြ႕အၾကံဳရယူျခင္းေတြဟာ အလြန္မွအေရးၾကီးတဲ႕အခ်က္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင္႔ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕academic နဲ႕ industry ေတြမွာ အလုပ္အကိုင္အခြင္႕အေရးေတြရဖို႕နဲ႕ career development ကိုလုပ္ေဆာင္ဖို႕ ၾကိဳးစားရမဲ႕အခ်ိန္ျဖစ္တယ္လို႕ ကၽြန္မထင္ပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္မရဲ႕စိတ္ပါ၀င္စားမႈအေပၚမူတည္ပီးေတာ႕ ကြန္ဂရက္ကို တက္ေရာက္မွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။တက္ေရာက္တဲ႕ပုဂၢိဳလ္တိုင္းဟာ၎တို႕တက္ေရာက္လိုတဲ႕ အစီအစဥ္ေတြကို တက္ေရာက္ၾကရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ခ်ဳံ႕ေျပာရမယ္ဆိုရင္ ကြန္ဂရက္၃ ရက္တာအတြင္းမွာ ေလ႕လာနိုင္တဲ႕ အေၾကာင္းအရာေတြကေတာ႕ critical health, mental health, global health, oncology & palliative care, robotics &technology, women’s health စသျဖင့္ အေၾကာင္းအရာေပါင္း ၄၈ ခုပါ၀င္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒါေတြအားလံုးကိုဘယ္သူကမွတစ္ထိုင္တည္းေလ႕လာနိုင္မွာမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ကေတာ႕ education,clinical education, EBP, method of teaching and learning, research methodology နဲ႕continue professional development စတဲ႕ အေၾကာင္းအရာေတြကို ေရႊးခ်ယ္တက္ေရာက္သြားဖို႕စီစဥ္ထားပါတယ္။
ျပီးေတာ႕ကမၻာမွာေရပန္းစားေနတဲ႕ေခါင္းစဥ္ေတြျဖစ္တဲ႕critical care, acupuncture နဲ႕ global health ေတြကိုေလ႕လာသြားဖို႕ရွိပါတယ္။ အဲဒီအတြက္ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ကြန္ကရက္မွာ တစ္ရက္အျပည္႕ နဲ႕ က်န္ တဲ႕ ႏွစ္ရက္မွာ ေန႕တစ္ပိုင္းစီတက္ဖို႕နိုင္အတြက္ poster displays ၄ ခု poster walks ၃ ခု၊classic platforms ၂ ခု၊ art platform ၁ ခု၊ networking session ၄ ခု၊ panels and debates အစီအစဥ္ ၂ ခု စတာေတြကို access လုပ္နိုင္ဖို႕ျပင္ဆင္သြားမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင္႕ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ Research paper ႏွစ္ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ထဲကေနျပီးအခု ၆၀ ကို ကၽြန္မၾကိဳတင္ေလ႕လာသြားမွာပါ။ paper ေတြရဲ႕ abstract ေတြကိုေတာ႕ April ၂၄ ရက္ေန႕မွာ publish လုပ္သြားမယ္လို႕သိရပါတယ္။
အခုဆိုရင္ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ WCPT congress မွာအဓိပၸါယ္ရွိရွိပါ၀င္နိုင္ဖို႕တခ်ိဳ႕ expert ေတြနဲ႕ researcher ေတြကို ဆက္သြယ္ထားပီးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ျပီးေတာ႕ကၽြန္မကို congress မွာ shift ၂ ခုစာအတြက္volunteer (၁၀ နာရီ) လုပ္ဖို႕ သူတို႕ကခြင္႕ျပဳခဲ႕ပါတယ္။ volunteer အလုပ္ကေတာ႕အစားစားပါပဲoffice assistant, registration assistant, poster assistant, exhibition hall assistant နဲ႕ တျခားလုပ္စရာေတြအမ်ားၾကီးရွိပါတယ္။
ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ကေတာ႕ ပိုစတာနဲ႕ scientific program monitoring အခန္းမွာ ကူညီေပးမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ volunteer လုပ္ဖုိ႕ မႏွစ္ကတည္းက ေလွ်ာက္ထားခဲ႕တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ဘာေၾကာင္႕လဲဆိုေတာ႕ ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ ဒီလိုပြဲၾကီးမွာ ပါ၀င္ပီးေတာ႕ WCPT ကို တတ္နိုင္သေလာက္အကူအညီေပးခ်င္လို႔ပါပဲ။ တကယ္ေတာ႕ စင္ကာပူျပင္ပက ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေတြကို volunteer လုပ္ဖုိ႕လက္မခံပါဘူး။WCPT organizers ေတြရဲ႕ေက်းဇူးေတြေပါ႕ သူတို႕က လူငယ္ေတြကိုအခြင္႕အေရးေတြေပးခ်င္ေနတာပါ။
ကၽြန္မက volunteer အေနနဲ႕ volunteer orientation, volunteer thank you event ေတြကိုလည္းတက္ရပါမယ္။ ကၽြန္မတို႕ရဲ႕ Asia Physical Therapy Student Association အေနနဲ႕ကလည္း informal meeting ေလးေတြလုပ္ၿပီး ေပ်ာ္ပြဲေလးေတြဆင္ႏႊဲၾကဦးမွာပါ။
ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ ဒီပြဲၾကီးကိုတက္နိုင္ဖို႕အတြက္ ၾကိဳးစားခဲ႕ရပါတယ္။အခုေလာေလာဆယ္ေတာ႕ ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ thesis ေတြ present လုပ္ဖို႕အစီအစဥ္မရွိေသးတာေၾကာင္႕ကၽြန္မတက္ေနတဲ႕ University နဲ႕ တျခား Institution ေတြမွာ scholarship ေလ်ာက္လို႕မရပါဘူး။
ဒါေပမယ္႕ ကၽြန္မအေနနဲ႕ WCPT congress မွာ ကိုယ္တိုင္ volunteer လဲလုပ္ခြင္႕ရမယ္ ျပီးေတာ႕ ကိုယ္တိုင္လည္းပါ၀င္ ဆင္ႏြဲမွာျဖစ္တဲ႕အတြက္ ၾကိဳျပီးေတာ႕ရင္ခုန္ေနမိပါတယ္။


စိုင္းရာဇာထြန္း MRS- Physical Therapy
MPTS

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE?

I haven't noticed that what my Leadership Style is before I learn about it. While I am leading the student’s team, mostly I tried to include all members in the decision-making process and I encourage their creativity and engagement. As a result, team members tend to have high satisfaction of being a follower of my group. So as a reflection, I used approach of Democratic Leaders. But this is not always same approach and good way to accomplish the task. Sometime when the task is need to be done by the time, I used to made decision without consulting with the team members even if their input would be useful. I think this can be appropriate when I need to make decision quickly and the team agreement isn't necessary to successful outcome.

There are many leadership style frameworks. However I don't know much and I think the leadership style we will used is mainly depend on the two factors, people and tasks. With people oriented leadership style, we focus on organizing, supporting and developing the team members. With task oriented leadership style, we focus on getting the job done. So I think I need to develop my leadership style by thoroughly understanding of other's leadership framework and styles. THE MORE APPROACHES I AM FAMILIAR WITH, THE MORE FLEXIBLE I CAN BE.


Useful Leadership Style Framework

Lewin's Leadership Styles
The Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid BlakeMouton
The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership® Theory Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory
Path-Goal Theory Path-Goal Theory
Six Emotional Leadership Styles Six Emotional Leadership Styles
Flamholtz and Randle's Leadership Style Matrix Leadership Style Matrix
Transformational Leadership transformational leadership
Dunham and Pierce's Leadership Model
Bureaucratic Leadership
Charismatic Leadership

IS IT OK TO BE SAD WHEN MY BEST FRIEND IS GETTING MARRIED!

Is it OK to be Sad when my best friend is getting married?

Is it OK to allow myself to grieve the loss of a close relationship, because it will change?

I have someone I’ve known for nearly a decade. We went to University together, we’ve collaborated on work together, we hang out together, we shopped together, we had trips where we spent together and we flight together.



Those are the time when we were learning what it meant to be best friend, what it meant to grow up. Yes, she is my Best Friend.

But now only one day left to her wedding day, I am genuinely happy for her but there is an element of sadness too.

She is the one I would call late into the night. She is the one who I would go to for advice about dresses, restaurants and life choices. She is there whenever I needed her and I was there for her as well.

But the reality is, relationships change. Change are good things but sometimes change hurts.

I know she is still my friend and this is also what she say repeatedly to me but the relationship changes. She cannot be there for me all the time. In truth, she shouldn’t be.

To be honest, I am so sad, because our time as single friends is over and we won’t have those whole day shopping, late-night phone conversations or the security of knowing someone is always there to listen.

All days I tried to hide my sadness and my tears in front of her because I wanted to let her talk about the wedding plans, I wanted to spend our precious time by having fun during preparing stuffs for wedding.

You know what I do all day? I just pray… pray…pray for the strength to resist such a change!

SPEAKING FROM THE HEART! My First Experience On An Expert Panel

I got the chance to sit shoulder to shoulder with some experts in the field of Gender Equality and Education. I was selected to be a panelist at the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative’s (UNGEI) & the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) East Asia and Pacific Regional Forum for Gender Equality in Education, which was held on 28 Aug, 2014 in Bangkok, Thailand. I was invited as a representative of Wedu to share one of my stories about the life experience of being a victim of the bad education system in Myanmar, and what I did to escape from being a victim. With the help of Wedu, it was an honor to participate in the big international forum on Gender Equality in Education, which brought together Regional and Global experts and high-level education stakeholders, including representatives form governments, Civil Society Organizations, and academia to discuss key gender in education issues in the East Asia Pacific region and shared good practices to inform advocacy for policy change.

This was my first experience of being a panelist ever. I went there to attend as a panelist without knowing exactly what it would look like. Since I got a confirmation via e-mail to be part of the panel discussion, Katie, the Operations and Outreach Coordinator at Wedu, explained how the session would proceed and what each panelist should be prepared to do. I planned to share my experience of being a victim of gender inequality in education in Myanmar and my story about how I missed the medical student life in Myanmar because girls need higher points in the matriculation exam than boys to get admission to medical college in Myanmar, which was my dream and my hopes since I was very young and also it was my mom’s big expectation of me.

Wedu practiced with me some sample questions. They practiced by asking questions like “How to try to escape from being a victim? Which alternatives did you choose to achieve your goal? What kind of challenges you will have to face in the future as a woman? What kind of messages do you want to give to future generations?” These questions helped make my speech to give at the forum, even though I hadn’t communicated with the moderator or other panelists before the event.

On the same day, just before the start of the panel discussion, one of the moderators helped me very quickly to make sure I got connected to other fellow panelists. All other panelists were well prepared and busy with the papers of their work outcomes. This was really frustrating, being the one among them because I had nothing to present for my work, research or to report to the audience. I was so nervous and excited. However, I had no choice, I couldn’t run away from that room, but I wished. So I tried to keep calm by knowing that I was going to tell them one of my life experiences, it is a reality, not made-up and also not statistics.

I started my story with “I am speaking from my heart…” because I had nothing to read and show. I stammered and was totally unorganized at the start but after a few minutes, I became normal since I noticed that I caught the attention of the audience. I made a conclusion by giving the message to my fellow sisters that when bad things happen to you because of bad education systems and policies, which discriminate women, you need to empower yourself, you need to take action and respond differently. At the end, I heard a huge clap from the audience when I mentioned my alternative that I chose to achieve my goal to be a doctor by doing PhD to get at least a “Title”.

“I was impressed by people’s dedication and efforts. I personally learned about gender inequality in education issues that I hadn’t known about before and I could establish the new contacts which critical to grow my scope and enhancing my career.”

My first experience as a panelist at the UNGEI and UNICEF’s East Asia Pacific Regional Forum on Gender Equality in Education. To my left is Nitya Roa (Professor, University of East Anglia), Alex Munive (Program Manager, Plan International), and Randi Gramshaug (Senior Adviser NORAD). To my right is Fiona Leach (Emeritus Professor, University of Sussex). It was really great to be among them. Thanks to Wedu, you gave me the opportunity to be on stage!

WHY I DECIDED TO ATTEND WCPT (World Confederation of Physical Therapy) CONGRESS, 2015, Singapore

I decided to attend WCPT (World Confederation of Physical Therapy) 2015 Congress on May 1 to 4, which will be held at Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre. http://www.wcpt.org/congress
This congress is held four yearly since 1963 at London, UK and the last 2011 WCPT congress was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This time in Singapore is coming across with 25 focused symposia, 33 networking sessions, 11 discussion panels and debates, over 15 seminars and the presentation of more than 2,000 abstracts planned over the three days, the scientific programme has been designed to showcase the best in physical therapy research, education, practice and service delivery across the breadth of the profession.
Taking part in this huge event has become one of my priorities since two years ago, As a PhD student, networking in the professional field is really important in order to provide information about myself and gather information about other professionals and potential opportunities. Hopefully in less than one year I will be promoted to PhD candidate, so I think it’s time to bridge the gaps between academia and industry which has many added benefits.

I just built my personal itinerary for my days at congress based on my interested field, everyone who planned to attend congress have their own track to join the congress. Obviously there are 48 topics area including critical health, mental health, global health, oncology & palliative care, robotics & technology and women’s health so no one can access all during three days. I made my own track for education, clinical education, EBP, method of teaching & learning, research methodology and continue professional development. As a side interest, I chose three more area; critical care, acupuncture and global health because these are the currently contemporary topics across the world. To cover these all topics I chose, I have to access 4 poster displays, 3 poster walks, 2 classic platforms, 1 art platform, 4 networking sessions and 2 panels and debates during one full day and two half days. According to my own program I could narrow down the research articles to 60 out of 2000 research papers, all of these papers’ abstract will be published on April 24. Now I am preparing everything for enjoying WCPT and already contacted with some of experts and researchers to discuss their works and ofcourse before travelling, reviewing 60 article abstracts in few days is tremendous amount of work but I am sure it’ll worth trying hard.

And also I am accepted for 10 hours (2 shifts) volunteering (roles of volunteer is varying including office assistant, registration assistant, poster assistant, exhibit hall assistant and in many other areas) in room monitoring for scientific programs and assisting to set up and tear down for posters. I applied to be a volunteer since last year because I want to contribute something I can to WCPT and work with such a huge and great team. Actually they don’t accept volunteers from outside of Singapore but the WCPT organizers are very kind and giving chances to youth generation. There are two more events for me as volunteer: volunteer orientation and volunteer thank you event. Apart from WCPT congress activities, we, APTSA (Asia Physical Therapy Student Association) executive members holding informal meeting and having fun together.

By the way, I tried and struggled to make it possible by my own  As long as I don’t have plan to present my work or my thesis, I am not eligible to apply scholarship for the congress from my University and other institutions.

I AM EXTEREMLY EXCITED TO BE A PART OF WCPT!!!