Project Reflection

Vietnam Economic Development Strategies is a Public Administration project from a group of Development Studies, Faculty of International Studies, Hanoi University junior students. Recovering from the COVID pandemic, VNEDS will have the responsibility to keep updated information on the newest economic news as well as Vietnam's economic growth initiatives. Each economic sector is being carefully researched, such as manufacturing, tourism, agriculture, and so on. Because sustainable development is the trend of the world, so digital economy, circular economy, and green growth strategies are being focused on significantly in this campaign with the desire to bring an overview of Vietnam’s economic situation in recent years and the linkages between economic policy and other sectors. Since then, optimal measures from different fields have been put in place to continue to improve economic efficiency while overcoming remaining limitations in the near future 2021-2030.

In addition, our team has been doing an investigation on Vietnam’s economic development strategies, with our special slogan “Together toward a sustainable Vietnam” to strengthen our belief in providing useful information for not only Vietnamese people but also foreigners about Vietnam’s goal in 2021-2030. Through some social networking platforms where economic knowledge is transmitted as well as the implementation of strategic policies of the Party and State in the context of fluctuations and unpredictable changes, we hope that the concern and basic awareness about the state economic policy could widely spread so that people can contribute more to the development of the country in the international arena.

Each member has their own specific duties such as creating content, writing articles, boosting social media, developing websites,... Therefore, we must divide the work equally and ensure all the work meets the teacher’s requirements. Firstly, some members must produce at least one article per week to achieve the goal of publishing 30 articles on the VNEDS website and the leader will aggregate the content, and supervise the work every day. Secondly, the members who are responsible for the website's development will synthesize data in order to post articles on the site, thus diversifying the structure to attract viewers when visiting the website. Thirdly, we have also conducted 3 videos: an introduction, overview, and interview video about us, our project, and what we found interesting to provide information on a global scale. And finally, boosting social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook is what we have specially chosen to advertise our project in order to gain as much interaction as possible.

We take charge of the website design and then report on our work progress weekly to give a clear picture of the website. After each group's meeting, we will synthesize comments from members, especially from the project manager, and follow them. The exchange between members then is necessary to have the most suitable results. In addition, we follow the progress on content to post articles/reviews of the team on the site every week. The official website of our team is shown below, although there are many shortcomings, all team members have tried their best.

Normally, we post one or two posts a day on our media platforms to promote the VNEDS project. It can be clearly seen that our work has reached more Vietnamese on Facebook compared to other platforms (Twitter and Instagram) as Facebook leads the list of popular social networks in Vietnam with almost 90 million accounts (08/2021). Also, we use Twitter and Instagram as a tool for VNEDS to reach a wide range of international audiences.

In our project, we also showed the relationships between the economic development strategies such as state-owned enterprises and some international organizations like WTO or FTAs. As a result, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the close combination of external and domestic factors in the process of perfecting the economic development strategy. With such a high spirit of hard work, the team completed the task one week earlier than the teacher's official deadline.

Talking about difficulties, our team sometimes had conflicts in ideation and implementation, so during the working process, there were many changes such as changing the topic from the current health policy in the COVID 19 period to the Vietnam Economic Development Strategies for the period of 2021-2030. Because each member of the team came from a different background, we were not used to working together at first, so sometimes misunderstandings occurred during the project. In addition, working online brought a number of conveniences, but there were also many difficulties in discussing content and recording videos.

Due to the fact that we have never done a face-to-face interview, it's hard for us to make clear questions and do the report. Moreover, since we have no experience in website design, the implementation process takes a lot of our time and effort so we have to learn how to do it on YouTube and Google. Next, deadlines were divided by week, so the completion of the topics was quite stable, but there were many times when things happened, so sometimes there were some delays in completing the work because of the deadlines of other subjects.

Despite experiencing numerous obstacles throughout the project, we also attempted to find solutions to each one. What matters most at the end of the project is what we've learned through our group work experiences. Situations arose during our time together that put us to the test in terms of making judgments and dealing with pressures and exceptions. When we misunderstand each other, we shall clarify patiently so that the entire group gets the concepts. After this project, we learned a lot such as always supporting and encouraging each other in order to complete the work. Not only listening to the other's viewpoint but also mutualizing respect as well as having the responsibility of the divided work. When some team members are busy with other subjects, the remaining members are always sympathetic and willing to help them during the project.