Blog Post #6: Final Reflection

Thinking back, the decision to step out of my comfort zone and bid for this module was because of the desire to equip myself with practical skills; such as resume-writing and how to be a better communicator, which are definitely of use in the future.

13 weeks later, I am glad to say that this module has offered me the skills which I wanted to pick up as well as skills that I had never thought that I could pick up through this course; such as being an active listener and making critical and constructive comments. I believe these life-long skills would certainly help me in the different aspects of my life besides my career.

On a whole, the main message that this course conveyed to me is that understanding the different aspects of communication (verbal and non-verbal) are very crucial to effectively convey a message, prevent any misunderstanding, resolve conflict, persuade or convince others. However, just understanding the communication skills is not sufficient. We have to integrate it into our daily lives and practice it for some time before we could become better at it.

Overall, I am grateful for being able to learn together with the other fellow classmates and I would like to thank Ms Happy Goh for guiding us through this module. (:

Blog Post #5: Reflection on Oral Presentation

Personally, i am really glad that my group's presentation went smoothly. However, we could have spent more time rehearsing to achieve a more confident and persuasive result, rather than perfecting our slides.

Our slides were made to look simple with clear, direct points. For statistical figures, we represented them using pie charts instead of bar charts so audiences can focus on one object and see the statistics relationship easily. We had also set a theme at the beginning to catch our audiences' attention, that is YES 2010! By adding a Y to our proposed module code, we hope to make it sound more dynamic; which i believe we did from the audiences' responses (: Overall, i feel that our slides were neatly done but we could have used more relevant animation to enhance the visual aids.

On the other hand, there are several aspects of my presentation that I need to improve on. Ms Goh commented that my voice was too soft and somewhat monotone. For this, I did try to project my voice to ensure the panel can hear me. But as I proceed with my slides, I was nervous that I tend to either read-off from my cue cards or turn backwards to refer to my slides. I actually know what I am supposed to present but I lack the confident to do so without having my cue cards as a back-up. So in the end, I tend to over rely on it. I was actually reading instead of presenting. My problem of being monotone needs to be overcome by more practices.

WengYin also told me that my body composure changed after I reached my second slide: from standing straight to bending one knee. I am sorry for showing a nonchalant posture. I was shuffling my feet back and fro during the Q & A session too. These would not have reflected nicely on my team so I would take note in future.